Peter Lovesey - The Reaper

Her worst nightmare. "You're going to dig him up?"

"Believe me, Rachel, we don't disturb the dead without good reason. A thing like this is new in my own experience. But I'll make sure it's all carried out with proper respect. They fetch out the coffin at first light, when village people aren't about. Then he'll be taken to a mortuary and examined. When it's all done, he'll be reburied. Are you all right? Shall I get you some water?"

She shook her head. He'd plunged her into molten terror and now he was offering a glass of water.

"Why? Why are they doing this?"

"Suspicions that a mistake may have been made by the doctor-in good faith, I'm sure."

She heard herself saying things she'd rehearsed in her head for this worst of all scenarios. "Gary died of a heart attack. He was being treated for heart disease."

"No question of that. It's all on record. But we have to be certain of the diagnosis, and this is the only way."

"I don't follow this at all." Torn between fear and denial, she was trying to recover some poise. "Suspicions, you said. What do you mean- suspicions!"

"It's part of a larger inquiry into a number of recent deaths."

"What?" Horrified, she played the words over to herself.

"Sorry, but I can't go into detail."

She took short, shallow breaths, her brain racing. What did they think-that she'd killed others, as well as Gary? "And what if I don't give permission?"

"It's out of your hands, Rachel. The coroner has jurisdiction here. If he's satisfied that a mistake may have been made, he can authorise it."

Her head throbbed and she wondered if she was going to faint. "When?"

"All the evidence is on his desk now. You can take it he won't turn down the application. Things could happen quite soon. We'll have a top man for the post mortem. If it was just heart failure, he'll know."

It seemed to Rachel that George expected her to break down and confess. She had enough self-control, just, to deny him that triumph.

Long after the wretched man had extricated himself from the sofa and gone, she stood with her arms tightly across her chest, trying to stop the convulsive shaking. The image in her brain was no longer of Cynthia's beached body, but herself handcuffed and with a blanket over her head being led to a police car. Neighbours shouting abuse. The hand on her head guiding her into the back seat. Questions at the police station. The charge. The cell. The magistrates' court. God, what a fool she'd been. If only Gary had been cremated, this couldn't have happened. If only she hadn't killed him at all…

Panicky thoughts continued to stream through her brain. In the dock at the Central Criminal Court, being sentenced to life imprisonment and taken down by the warders.

There was no way out of this now. It was naive to hope that they wouldn't find traces of aconitine. It may have been the undetectable poison in Victorian times but you could bet modern science had ways of testing for it. A top pathologist was going to find traces in Gary's organs. She could hear him giving evidence for the prosecution. Hear the neighbours saying a huge clump of monkshood grew in her garden before she dug it up.

Black despair gripped her. She'd tried to get away with it and failed. Would she get a lighter sentence if she confessed before they did the exhumation? Or was it already too late to make any difference?

Mentally she put herself in the dock again and tried pleading diminished;responsibility. She'd been desperately unhappy with Gary. He'do neglected her, taken separate Holidays. Beaten her; yes, she'd need to say he was a wife-beater, and so he had been … almost. He had come close to hitting her more than once and she could play up the violence without fear of contradiction. He'd accused her falsely of being unfaithful. Caused her acute embarrassment by going up to the rectory to brand Otis as an adulterer.

Otis.

He was a major player in this tragedy.

Would he vouch for her in court? Could she depend on him to say there wasn't an iota of truth in Gary's wild imaginings?

If she couldn't bank on Otis, there was no hope left in the world.

She needed him to speak up for her with all the dignity and authority of his position as parish priest. That, she told herself, would massively strengthen her case and win sympathy. If he was firm in denying that anything happened between them, then Gary's charge of immorality would be seen as manifestly unfair. Was one fumbled clinch on the sofa going to trouble his Christian conscience? He'd ruin his own reputation if he said anything about it.

The court would accept that she had been provoked beyond endurance. She'd heard of several cases of battered wives being treated leniently by the courts after confessing to killing their brutal husbands under extreme provocation. "It is the view of this court that you have already suffered enough, Mrs. Jansen. You are no danger to the public, and a long term of detention would serve no purpose. In view of the extreme provocation you were under, and taking into account your full and frank confession to unlawful killing I am directing the jury not to convict on the charge of murder. They will instead decide whether you are guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, for which the law allows me to exercise discretion over sentencing."

Would that it were true!

Impulsively she snatched up the phone and called Otis, praying she wouldn't hear an answerphone message.

"Joy."

He was there, thank God.

"Otis, it's Rachel. I'm in the most awful trouble. Can I see you urgently?"

"What's up?"

"I'd rather not say on the phone."

"Can you come to the rectory?"

"Now?"

"Give me twenty minutes."

She gave him ten. On the way up there she saw two people she wished she hadn't, Owen Cumberbatch and his sister. Miss Cumberbatch waved in a friendly way. Owen-the village snoop-just stared, curious to see where she was heading. She didn't turn round after passing them, but she was sure he watched every pace she took towards the rectory.

Otis opened the door before she needed to knock and she hurried inside and blurted out the news that the police were going to exhume Gary.

He looked surprised and genuinely concerned. "Whatever for?"

"They think I poisoned him, and, God forgive me, I did." Without any more warning than that, she threw herself on his mercy. She had to be totally open with him.

His hand went to the strip of white across his throat as if to check that it was there. "Rachel, this can't be true."

"I dug up some roots from the garden and added them to his curry. That's what killed him. The doctor said it was heart failure, but he didn't arrive until Gary was too far gone to speak."

He shaped his mouth to respond and nothing came out. This silver-tongued man was totally at a loss.

"I used aconite."

He stared, frowning.

"From a plant called monkshood."

Miraculously, his expression softened. "Aconite?" he repeated in a tone she'd never heard from him before. It sounded oddly like reverence. He might have been chanting the name of one of the Old Testament prophets.

"It's extremely poisonous," she said.

"Deadly," he agreed in the same awed tone.

Weird. She felt no disapproval from him; almost the reverse. "It's supposed to have been undetectable once, but I'm sure it isn't these days. Otis, I don't expect anyone to forgive me, but I'm telling you because you're the only person I want to confide in. My marriage was hell. You could see that, couldn't you?"

"What?" His thoughts hadn't moved on from the mention of aconite.

"Gary and I. A disaster area."

"You told me you weren't very close, but-"

"He was out to humiliate me-and you as well. He thought you and I had … had made love while he was in America."