Imogen Robertson - Island of Bones

‘Please, permit me to take some of the fault for your current distress,’ he continued. ‘I allowed a veil to be drawn over this. We never discussed why your husband was made a target at that time. I guessed, but I did not ask. And I should have realised by my advanced age that turning from what troubles us is no escape.’ She looked up briefly at that with a crooked smile, and he returned it. ‘I do not ask you to draw up a balance-sheet, but you have saved lives, you have served a greater good. How many deaths go unremarked, killers unpunished? Would you let the being who killed Herr Hurst, or Mr Askew, go free to murder again? Would you let Casper be taken off and hanged for the convenience of the authorities because you have decided that you should stop asking questions? Because of that little lawyer and his kind? Your husband married a braver woman than that. I wish to God I had had the pleasure of your friendship in fifty-one. I might have saved my brother from the gallows, had I known you then. Now dry your eyes, do! I need you to see this clearly.’ He slowly released his grip.

Harriet pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and began to wipe her eyes. She blew her nose and inhaled deeply.

‘Very well, Crowther. Though I think I should retire to some nunnery when we are done with this business.’

‘I doubt they would have you,’ he replied dryly. ‘I have never seen you stay still for more than half an hour at a time. Hours of silent prayer would be beyond you.’

He went back to the body again, then heard her follow him to the centre of the room. He heard her voice, and the tone was more like the woman he knew.

‘As it happens, I was three years old in fifty-one,’ she said quietly, and knelt down beside him.

Agnes jerked awake in the gloom, scrambled to her feet and called out, thinking some movement beyond the barrier must have woken her. Silence. She had spent most of the night too afraid to close her eyes. Then she could not be wakeful and frightened any longer. Sleep had taken pity on her. Since her waking at first light though, she had sung to herself whenever she was able, hoping that someone might pass by and hear her, but she could not help shutting her eyes from time to time, and whenever she woke, it was with this cold panic that someone might have passed the mouth of the tunnel while she slept, and left her here. She knew she would be looked for, but if Swithun was right and her people were looking on the wrong side of the lake, thinking she had lost her way in the storm, and if Casper hadn’t seen her arrive in the rainstorm. . She was sure neither of the Fowlers would be back now. She had a little bread left and a few mouthfuls of water.

It was a truth she knew of magic that each spell cast had a cost. She had been so angry at Stella that she thought she was willing to pay it, but now, curled and hungry in the darkness, she thought perhaps it was Thomas she should have been angry with, not the girl — and rather than get bitter and crooked, that she should have only held her head high and laughed at them. Casper had tried to take the hurt of the spell away from her by sending her up the hill with the poppet, but she had wandered away from it to see the fireworks. If she had stayed by them as she had been told, she would not have seen Casper being beaten, would not have been taken herself.

Drying her eyes, she then put her hands together and began to whisper church prayers. The hills would hear them, and know she had learned what she needed to know. She accepted her punishment then, and prayed for forgiveness. When the idea came to her it dropped like a stone into the cool centre of her mind and she opened her eyes with a gasp.

Crowther reached forward and twitched Mr Askew’s collar to one side.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Harriet said.

Instead of replying he pointed to the neck and Harriet saw a thin groove across the man’s throat, sharp-edged. It cut like a purple furrow across his windpipe. She bent forward, steadying herself among the broken glass with her left hand, then wet her lips and said, ‘Too narrow and straight-edged for any rope, yet it was certainly wrapped round his throat. Leather perhaps?’ She looked around the room and without waiting for him to reply, continued, ‘Someone comes at him from behind. At some point in the struggle he grabs on to this display case and pulls it forward.’ She paused. ‘It might have saved him.’

Crowther nodded. ‘But the debris from the cabinet seems to extend below him.’ He lifted Askew’s shoulder and the glass crackled under the body. ‘He was pulled clear before the cabinet fell. His assailant obviously managed to keep his grip. A brave attempt though.’

‘The noise must have been terrific,’ Harriet said, getting to her feet again.

‘Perhaps that is why the killer made no attempt to hide the crime, beyond partially closing the blinds, though perhaps Mr Askew might have been doing that himself as he closed up his business. In either case the killer might well have left as soon as he was sure Askew was dead in case his neighbours came to investigate the noise.’

‘You believe it was a man?’

Crowther rose to his feet and felt his knees complain. ‘Probably. This required some strength, and Mr Askew was not a small man.’

She had ceased to listen to him but turned to the broken doorway. ‘The door was locked. There must be another way out of this house.’

Crowther continued to stare at the dead man and the varied minerals scattered about him. Some still had their labels attached, written in Askew’s punctilious script. Black wad of the Borrowdale Plumbago Mines; Quartz with silver trace from the old mine above Silverside Hall .

Crowther had not warmed to Mr Askew during their brief acquaintance. He did not like the hordes of cooing pleasure-seekers the man encouraged into the town with his fireworks and regattas, and had thought his understanding of the geology of the region was probably superficial at best. However, looking at the scattered minerals he saw the workings of a methodical mind. He had heard Mr Askew’s maps of the area praised, and no one creates a decent map without difficult and detailed work. Examining the labels now, Crowther had to admit that to an extent Mr Askew had been a man after his own heart. He had sought to understand the world around him by breaking it into tiny pieces and giving each part its proper name, attempting to understand the whole by comprehending the detail. Such were Crowther’s concerns in his anatomical studies, yet whatever expertise he had developed, he had never managed to arrive at an understanding of living human beings, their sensitivities and concerns. He wondered if Mr Askew had ever sensed a similar paradox. He had charted and measured each fold in the hills around him, ferreted out its history and its mineral treasures, its legends, but had he ever understood the place entire, how it flowed into its people, and how its people fed it in return?

Harriet emerged from the office. ‘All windows are bolted, as is the door to the yard from that room back there.’

‘The private apartments on the first floor?’

‘There is a door at the top of the stairs, also locked. Only the front door has not had the bolts drawn.’

‘But it was locked also.’

Harriet had knelt down by the body again, blocking Crowther’s view.

‘Was it not said that only Askew had a key?’ she asked Crowther. ‘It is not in his pockets.’

‘Most likely the murderer took it with him.’

Harriet got to her feet again. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps we are dealing with sprites and ghosts, after all.’

Crowther crouched down again and continued to examine the body. ‘What time is it, Mrs Westerman?’ He heard the flick as she opened her pocket-watch.