He tried to hold her back, but Nora forced her way past him. ‘I need to look at her,’ she cried. ‘Please let me look at her.’ If she hadn’t known better, she would have said that Emily had fallen down the stairs. She stood over her body, looking at the awkward, crumpled way she was positioned, and it seemed so obvious that she wondered if Emily had still been alive when she left her after all? Then she remembered the blood, so much blood, and that terrible, stertorous breathing.
‘She must have fallen,’ Tom said, and Nora wanted to tell him to stop, to give her time to think, but he ploughed relentlessly on. ‘Look, her shoelace is undone. What a bloody awful thing to happen. I’m so sorry, love. I know how close you were. Come here.’
He put his arm round her and led her gently away.
‘Do you live nearby?’ Penrose asked.
‘Yes, just behind the harbour.’
‘Then take Mrs Pendean home and stay with her. I’ll ask Miss St Aubyn to send someone to check on her.’
Tom nodded. ‘What about the causeway?’
‘Don’t worry about that now. I’m sure the three of us can manage if necessary.’
‘All right, but be sharp about the timing or you’ll never make it across.’
He turned back to Nora and held her close, and she clung to him as the only thing that made sense. ‘Come on, love – let’s go home. You’ve had a terrible shock.’
She wondered if he would ever know how true his words were. ‘What about Charlie?’ she said, suddenly remembering the cat. ‘We can’t just leave him, Tom.’
‘All right, all right.’ He scooped the cat up and gave him to her to hold. ‘You were a good friend, Nora,’ he said. ‘Emily was lucky to have you.’
7
As Tom Pendean led his wife from the building, Penrose watched them go, trying to make sense of what was happening on the island and what his priorities should be. He locked the museum and went straight to the Change House to call the castle and speak to Hilaria. She took the news calmly, but he could hear the strain in her voice, and he knew that these tragedies would take their toll once the anaesthetising practicalities were dealt with.
Deep in thought, he returned to Emily Soper’s body, conscious of having a limited amount of time before low tide offered the only opportunity to access the mainland. The bizarre surroundings of the scene struck him anew as he entered the room, even though this time he was prepared for them. Mrs Soper had obviously been a talented taxidermist in her own right, as well as a collector: a workbench was covered in the tools of the trade, and the gimlet eye of a jay in full flight stared across at him – a work in progress, now garishly lifelike by comparison with its creator.
He went back to the foot of the stairs and crouched down by the dead woman. Her dull eyes looked past him as if hoping for someone more important to enter the room, and her hair was matted with viscous, sticky blood – although there was very little on the floor beneath her head. Curious, he fetched one of the lamps from the museum and placed it on the step beside her body, then gently lifted Mrs Soper’s head and examined the wound on her temple. The laceration was ragged and deep, and as he peered more closely in the fitful light, he could see tiny fragments of something – most probably wood or paint – embedded in the skin. He considered the significance of what his eyes were telling him, keeping an open mind to other possible explanations until an expert opinion was available, but one thing now seemed certain: however Emily Soper had died, it wasn’t from an accidental fall down these bare stone steps; a fatal blow to the head was far more likely. He lifted her arms, one after the other, pulling her sleeves back to examine the skin; there was no sign of bruising from an attempt to defend herself, suggesting that the attack had taken her completely by surprise, but that was the only blessing he could find. Her skin was grey and cold to the touch, with rigor well developed, and had he been forced to hazard a guess at the time of death, he would have put it at several hours before Richard Hartley.
Penrose stood up and looked round for a possible murder weapon, but there was nothing immediately obvious in this bizarre collection of dead animals and Victorian mourning dolls, all waiting to be repaired, and neither could he find anything remotely out of place in either of the upstairs rooms. The museum might hold more possibilities, but he was wasting time with uneducated guesses when everything he needed to know for the time being had already been established: there were two suspicious deaths on the island, not one. It was reasonable to suppose that they might be connected, but for the life of him he couldn’t see how.
He knelt quietly again by Mrs Soper’s body, as if respect could help him to find an answer to his questions, but it only served to deepen his sadness. It never ceased to amaze him, this indefinable but crippling sense of rage that he was capable of feeling for a stranger – shamefully more powerful than the emotions which underpinned many of his longstanding friendships – but he clung to it as the essence of who he was, and he knew that if it ever let him down, it would be time to concede defeat.
When he was ready to leave, he blew out the lamp and went back to the museum to collect the photograph albums from the counter where he had left them. The smell that he had noticed there before and thought nothing of now seemed more significant – a faint but unmistakable odour of disinfectant. The floor had obviously been recently washed, and he knelt down to look for any evidence that might have been missed; the cleaning was a reasonably thorough job, but he knew how difficult it was to eradicate everything and his patience was soon rewarded by a spatter of blood on the wall, and other marks on the floor leading through to the back room. No doubt a proper forensic examination would reveal more, but Penrose was satisfied for now that regardless of where Mrs Soper had been found, the attack had taken place here, at the counter.
Looking round the museum again, he noticed that one of the cases was open. It was devoted to a collection of sweetheart jewellery, sent home from South Africa by migrant Cornish miners, but some of the contents were missing from the neatly labelled shelves and the detail struck him as odd. His first thought was of Gerald Lancaster, but he doubted very much that petty theft was at the root of either death. Still brooding on what might link the two victims, Penrose pulled the blinds and locked the door, then hurried back up to the castle.
He was shown to the study, where Hilaria sat staring out of the window. ‘Emily Soper lived on this island her whole life,’ she said sadly, without any other greeting. ‘She was a nice woman – a decent woman. She shouldn’t have died alone.’
‘I’m afraid there’s more to it than that,’ Penrose said. He could see by the shock on his friend’s face that she had understood his meaning immediately, but he outlined everything carefully to avoid any misunderstandings.
‘Please tell me that the deaths are connected, at least,’ Hilaria said. ‘I don’t think I could bear the idea of harbouring two murderers under this roof.’
‘You mustn’t—’
‘Don’t tell me not to blame myself, Archie. You know me better than that. Have you got any idea what is going on here?’
‘Not yet, but I’m going over to the mainland now with the men that Tom Pendean recommended. I hope to have some answers for you when I get back.’