“What day is it?”
“Wednesday. You were out for almost twenty-four hours.”
“Where’s Alice?” Flashes of what had happened at the old beekeeper’s house started to come back to her.
“She’s down at the station.”
“What happened?”
“We got a call from a man called Eddie Sedgwick. He kept babbling on about something terrible happening at Alice Green’s house. We got there as soon as we could. Eddie had a nasty knife wound to his shoulder. Alice was lying on the kitchen floor and you were unconscious at the dining table.”
“What about Alice? She killed those three people.”
“I know. She made a full confession. She’ll be charged with the murders of Stanley Green, Milly Lancaster and Dennis Albarn, as well as the attempted murder of Eddie Sedgwick.”
“Is Eddie all right?”
“He’ll be fine. He’s quite handy with a frying pan.”
“So it was — oh, I can’t work this out.” Taylor sat up in the bed and her vision went black for a few seconds. “So it was Alice, after all?”
“She told us everything. She killed Stanley Green by accident. Hit him with a shovel in a fit of rage. She panicked and buried his body in her garden and then somehow his hand worked its way out of the ground. Milly Lancaster saw it and she had to be silenced.”
“What about Dennis Albarn?”
“He met up with Stanley the day before he was killed so he could’ve talked. When word got out that it was Stanley in the fishing nets, Alice had to shut Albarn up for good. She kept going on about the status quo and how it had to be preserved. She’s a few bob short of a pound note, if you ask me.”
“I still don’t understand. How did she do it? She had us all fooled.”
“She had DCI James fooled. He’s not going to like this. He’s been parading around in public saying all sorts of things about the Trotterdown police department and now he’s going to come across as an idiot. Flummoxed by an old beekeeper.”
Taylor smiled. That’s one consolation, she thought.
“We got it all out of her. After Milly saw the finger, Alice had to act quickly. She suggested they go for a sunset trip up to Merryhead. They’d done it a few times before, so Milly didn’t think there was anything amiss. They went in Milly’s car. Alice bashed her brains in with a rock, jammed the locks and pushed the car over the cliff with Milly in it.”
“And then she walked home? It’s five miles.”
“She’s in good shape. She hid the screwdriver she used to jam the locks in Peter Sugden’s bin and said just enough to make us suspect Sugden. The body in the garden was bothering her so she chopped it in half with a shovel and chucked the two pieces over Merryhead. It should have all worked out just fine for her, except that the fisherman was lucky enough to drag up the body in his nets.”
“Lucky? Not sure that poor man would call it that. And what about Albarn?” Taylor’s head was spinning. She still couldn’t believe what had happened.
“She phoned Dennis Albarn from a payphone in Trotterdown and suggested they meet at his house. She said there was something in Stanley Green’s will for him. She had him hook, line and sinker. He opened the door and Alice whacked him with the shovel before he had a chance to react. She dragged him inside, opened up the gas and left him there. The lightning strike later on was a stroke of luck. Then she hid the shovel in Albarn’s shed.”
“I feel like I’ve been dreaming these past few weeks,” Taylor said. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“The scary part is this. She doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong. Besides Milly Lancaster, which she puts down to necessity, she’s shown no remorse about any of it.”
“But she called the police herself for Milly! What was going on there?”
“She really seems to have managed to convince herself for a while that she hadn’t killed her. I think it only came back to her later. Maybe something triggered it for her?”
“Perhaps that’s why she had that weird obsession with the honey. Remember how she kept saying there was something wrong with the honey? The bees like the bushes where she’d buried Stanley. There couldn’t have been anything really wrong with it — it’s hardly as if his body was starting to decompose so soon — but perhaps it was her way of dealing with it. Or repressing it. I feel such a fool. And I had her in my house!”
“We were all fooled. Some of us more than others.”
“What will happen to her?”
“She’ll probably spend the rest of her life in jail.” Killian sighed. “Or a psychiatric unit. She’ll give the shrinks a field day.”
“Can I see her?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. She’s not the sweet old beekeeper we thought she was. You got quite close to her, didn’t you?”
“What about Eddie Sedgwick? What was he doing in Alice’s house yesterday?”
“Eddie’s the only person who suspected something all along. He’s not as doddery as he comes across. He said he’d been watching Alice for quite some time and realised that something strange was going on. He saw your car there and decided to go and check to see if everything was all right. You were lucky. He may have saved your life.”
Taylor swung her legs out of bed and stood up.
“What are you doing?” Killian said. “They’ll want to keep you in for observation and you need to rest.”
“I’ve been resting in here for twenty-four hours,” Taylor said. “There’s a holiday I need to take.”
THE END
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