Nemesis of the Dead (21 page)

‘Oh, Diana, no!’ She fell to her knees on the rough stone slabs and tried to help Diana sit up, but she thrashed about wildly, fighting her off. Although gagging painfully, she still hadn’t been sick. Remembering how Tina had made Maria vomit up the poison, Corrie scrambled to her feet and reached for the salt cellar, still on the table. She was about to grab the water jug when a bony hand seized her wrist in an iron grip.

‘Leave her,’ ordered the professor. ‘It’s quite useless. She’s had enough poison to kill an elephant. There’s nothing anyone can do to save her.’ His tone was matter-of-fact, conversational even, as if commenting on unfortunate weather.

Diana lay on the ground, jerking and convulsing, her flawless features now distorted in agony. For a brief moment, Corrie thought it was a nightmare – that kaleidoscope hell where fact and fantasy whirl together, indistinguishable. In a minute, she would wake up in the real world with Jack snoring beside her and Diana safe in her room with a sane, loving husband.

Suddenly, the heartrending screams stopped and Diana lay still, the flashing green eyes closed for ever. Corrie cradled her head, feeling her golden curls damp with sweat. Her perfume drifted up, still heady and vibrant. Even in death, she looked breathtakingly beautiful. It was a wicked, wilful destruction of life. Corrie heard herself weeping hysterically. If only she had listened to Jack instead of arrogantly thinking she knew better. She might have warned Diana, got her away, saved her life.

‘Diana, I’m so sorry.’ She sobbed bitterly over the body she had so envied, now limp and unresponsive. ‘It’s all my fault. If only I’d listened.’

Then the red mist descended – thick and blinding. Corrie seethed with boiling, churning rage. The flood of adrenaline pumping through her veins made her dizzy. It was a case of ‘fight or flight’ and foolishly, Corrie chose fight. She stood up and faced the professor, hot tears still pouring down her face.

‘You bastard. You murdering, heartless, evil bastard. Don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to get away with this. Jack’s already on to you and I shall tell him everything, give him the evidence with your fingerprints all over it and they’ll lock you away for the rest of your life – you’ll never see your precious plants ever again!’

‘I don’t think you will,’ he replied, reasonably, picking up Corrie’s empty glass. ‘Of course, you haven’t consumed as much poison as my lovely wife over there, but you’ve swallowed more then enough to silence you long before your bungling husband returns.’

‘Oh no I haven’t! I threw it in the …’ Corrie blurted it, unthinking and in white-hot temper. She knew it was a fatal, mindless mistake before the words were even out. Gordon grabbed her hard around the throat, forcing her backwards into the vines. She could smell the bunches of sticky, overripe grapes as they squashed around her head. In a different situation, her generous proportions might have given her an edge over his spindly frame, but now his strength was astounding and took her completely by surprise. He shoved her down into one of the rustic chairs, pulling her arms behind her. Then he whipped a length of cord from his pocket and tied her wrists.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to be here, Coriander, you are an irritating complication but luckily I came prepared. Soft cord you will observe – I don’t want them to find marks on your wrists after you’re dead. Now, I think perhaps you had better take a little more refreshment, my dear.’ He reached for Diana’s half-empty glass and, squeezing Corrie’s cheeks, he forced the rim against her teeth. She could taste the bitter, aniseed liquid pouring into her mouth and tried desperately not to swallow but she was choking and gulped it down involuntarily. She knew, in that single defining moment, that she was going to die agonizingly, callously murdered, but even worse, without Jack to comfort her. The hotel was deserted, there was no one to come to her aid. Then, in a miraculous flash of lucidity, she remembered Tim. He hadn’t gone to town with the others, he was exhausted from his rough, overnight ferry trip and had gone up to his room to rest. It was worth a try. He might hear her as the afternoon was so still and silent. She took as deep a breath as her panicking lungs would allow and screamed, ‘Tim! Tim! Help me!’

‘You’re wasting the last of your precious breath, my dear.’ The professor was matter of fact. ‘Watkins’s room is round at the back of the hotel, on the top floor. He’s fast asleep, thanks to a little valerian in his tea, and will hear nothing. I made sure when I found out he had returned to the island with some meddlesome message from that silly wife of his.’

‘You tried to kill her, too, didn’t you, you bastard?’ Corrie felt she had nothing to lose by making the maniac confess; unlike poor Diana she felt no ill effects yet, apart from abject terror, so maybe there was a slim chance she might stay alive long enough to tell someone. She stuck out her trembling chin, belligerently. ‘What went wrong? Did your brilliant research turn out to be not so brilliant after all? Did you get the dose wrong?’

The professor sighed. ‘Of course I didn’t try to kill the stupid child, although it would have been no loss to mankind for all the use she was as an intelligent human being. It wasn’t my fault, Coriander. None of this is my fault. You do understand, don’t you?’ His voice was earnest, concerned that she should believe him and seemingly wanting her to stay conscious long enough for him to defend his indefensible crimes. ‘People kept interfering. First it was Maria, so desperate to become pregnant that she exchanged lamps with Diana. How was I supposed to have anticipated that? Naturally, I had already applied concentrated poison to Diana’s wick but Maria chewed it instead. Not a sufficient dose, as it turned out, because as you know, Maria survived. A useful test of the potency of my newly developed toxin, however. Rats are all very well but no substitute for a human guinea pig. Then that vacuous child, Ellie, drank Diana’s wine. How could I be held responsible for that? If she had remained at her usual place at table instead of fidgeting about, Diana would have been dead days ago and none of this unpleasantness would be necessary.’ He stood up and began pacing about, puzzled that Corrie was not yet showing any inclination to die. Irritably, he grasped a handful of her hair, forced her head back and poured more ouzo down her throat.

Corrie gagged but through the cotton wool that was now her brain, the clues began to fall into place like the mandatory last scene in the library at the end of an Agatha Christie mystery. She recalled Ellie, dim, besotted Ellie, that night at the dinner party. She had moved into Diana’s seat when Diana got up to dance with Sid, partly to avoid sitting close to the smelly
kokorétsi
but mainly to be on Tim’s left, so they could hold hands while they ate. She had absent-mindedly picked up Diana’s wine glass and drunk from it.

Corrie struggled to speak. ‘Are you saying you actually watched Ellie drink Diana’s wine, knowing it had your filthy poison in it, and you didn’t stop her?’

‘I had no choice. You must see that. If I’d stopped her, it would have aroused suspicion and I knew that dull-witted, flat-footed husband of yours was already watching me. Anyway, she only sipped it in that silly, simpering way of hers. Diana would have gulped it down and then it would all have been over. That meddling nurse couldn’t have saved her.’ The glass he held was empty now so he reached behind him for the bottle of neat ouzo. In that instant, Corrie glimpsed possible salvation. Over his shoulder she saw a familiar figure bashing an octopus against the kitchen tree-stump to soften it up for dinner. Ariadne. Thank God! Thank St Sophia! She still had no stomach cramps and no vision disturbance, apart from the alcoholic effects of the ouzo. There might still be a chance. She screeched with all the breath she had left. ‘Ariadne! Ariadne! Help me!’

Ariadne looked up, alarmed, and was about to scamper across but the professor shouted urgently to her in Greek. To Corrie’s horror, she squealed, threw her apron over her head and scuttled back into her kitchen.

‘Ariadne won’t help you. I told her the devil had possessed you. She believes it is the curse of St Sophia and she ran for her life. Clever of me, isn’t it, to make use of an old woman’s fear and superstition? She’s very loyal, Ariadne. Knows when to keep her mouth shut. She helped me to poison Diana’s picnic lunch but that bloated buffoon Dobson ate it instead. Interference, you see? More interference. If only people would mind their own business and allow me to get on with mine, life would be so much simpler. All the same, I’m glad Dobson died the way he did. There was a certain poetic irony about it, don’t you think? It was a plant that kept him alive and a plant that finally killed him.’ He laughed, his eyes now mad and staring. Corrie was nothing if not feisty and although terrified, she was determined not to let him think he had won so easily. Kicking out with her feet, she tried to tip her chair over and clawed helplessly at the cord binding her wrists. Gordon put his hands around her throat.

‘Please don’t struggle, Coriander. There’s really no point and I don’t want to leave finger marks on your throat. Strangulation is clumsy and uncouth and not part of my plan.’

‘They’ll know it was you when the post mortem finds your poison in our bodies,’ she choked.

His cackle this time was unquestionably that of an incurably deranged man.

‘Ah but they won’t, you see. That’s the beauty of it. The sheer, unerring brilliance of my research into toxins. I keep trying to tell you, Coriander, plants are so much more intelligent than human beings. They outsmart us at every level. Only plants, our very origins, have any relevance to our lives and our future. Let me explain before you die. The toxin that is currently effecting dangerous changes to your heart rhythm and will eventually induce vomiting, psychoses and death is distilled from the bulb of a genetically modified
urginea maritima
– the sea squill. Through my incomparable skills, I have been able to cultivate a hybrid of the red and white varieties, both potentially poisonous in their original iterations. I have called my hybrid
urginea Gordonea
. Toxin distilled from this plant is not only deadly and with no known antidote but it has an additional and invaluable property as a murder weapon – it decomposes in the body in a matter of hours. By the time the incompetent idiots in pathology get you and my lovely wife, Diana, on their slab, it will be totally undetectable.’

Corrie drew a shuddering breath. ‘You can’t be sure of that! The only post mortems you’ve done have been on rats.’

The professor smiled triumphantly. ‘Why do you suppose they couldn’t find any traces of poison in my dear, departed sister, Lavinia?’

‘Lavinia? Lavinia Braithwaite? She was your sister? Oh my god!’ Corrie slumped in her chair, beaten at last by his shocking and unemotional revelation.

‘Oh I know they suspected me. Pulled me in for questioning on several occasions – but they couldn’t prove a thing, because I’m so much smarter than the police. No evidence of poisoning and not even a motive, as it turned out, because the senile old bitch left all her money to some scrounging charity instead of me. So you see, I had no choice then. I had to get rid of Diana. Rather a pity in a way, she was an exquisite creature, but it couldn’t be helped.’ He spoke impassively as if he had just dispatched a favourite, exotic parrot. ‘When your nosy husband returns from his fishing trip, he’ll find two bodies, claimed by the same mysterious food bacterium that attacked the others. Detective Inspector Dawes and I will, of course, be distraught widowers, united in our grief – except that I shall be very, very rich.’ Impatient now, he poured neat ouzo into Corrie’s mouth straight from the bottle and shook her like a Jack Russell shakes a rat to make her swallow. ‘Naturally, he’ll be suspicious, like the other policemen, but it will do him no good. Ariadne will swear that I spent all day on the far side of the island among the olive groves. There will be no proof, no opportunity, no evidence and only one witness to your death, my dear Coriander. Me.’

‘And me, Cuthbert, baby,’ drawled a familiar voice. ‘Don’t forget me.’

Diana was standing just behind him, calm, poised and surprisingly beautiful, belying the fact that just minutes ago, she had been thrashing around in the dust, screaming. Her face was flushed, her hair tangled but she was very much alive.

At the sound of her voice, the professor’s florid face drained of colour. He turned very slowly and froze, transfixed with horror. Corrie gasped, unable to speak for the first time in her life. Gordon began to back away from his resurrected wife, shaking his head in disbelief, his slack mouth opening and closing like a landed goldfish, bug-eyes wide with fear. If he had watched Diana rise, zombie-like, from the grave of the undead, he could not have been more traumatized. He stumbled backwards, his gaze never leaving her, clinging desperately to the vines for support. When he reached the entrance to the pergola, he turned to run but a muscular arm snaked out, locking him firmly around the throat.

‘H
old it right there, Prof.’ The grim owner of the restraining arm showed not a glimmer of his usual lighthouse smile. ‘Detective Inspector Dawes wants a word with you.’

‘Christ, Sidney, you took your time!’ Diana collapsed on to the nearest chair and pushed trembling fingers through her mane of hair.

Sidney had expected – had hoped – that the professor would struggle, try to resist arrest. Sid was not a violent man, very rarely got into a temper about anything, but now he ached to smash his fist into Gordon’s face. Make him feel some of the fear and pain he had so pitilessly inflicted on others. But the professor was already a broken man. The shock of discovering he was not an invincible genius, that something had gone radically wrong with his faultlessly brilliant research had finally tipped him over the edge of reason into total, vacant insanity. He neither moved nor spoke as Jack jerked his arms behind his back and snapped on the handcuffs.

‘Cuthbert Delauncey Gordon, I’m arresting you for the murder of Lavinia Delphine Braithwaite and Ambrose Aubrey Dobson and the attempted murder of Maria Stasinopoulos, Eleanor Lucy Watkins, Diana Marilyn Gordon and … Corrie?’

Jack spotted his wife for the first time, hidden in the far corner of the pergola, still tied to her chair and trembling with terror and shock. She tried to speak, to tell him she’d been poisoned and probably only had minutes to live but could only gibber incoherently through chattering teeth. Leaving Sidney holding Gordon, Jack strode across and untied her, scooping her up into his arms and holding her tight. He whispered ‘Oh Corrie, Corrie,’ over and over in her ear and kissed her hair tenderly. Then he held her abruptly away from him.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’ Through the rushing noise in her ears, she could hear him yelling at her, his fright and relief exploding into anger. ‘What did you think you were playing at? I distinctly told you to stay out of the way. You were supposed to be in town, out of danger. You promised me. Will you never learn to do as you’re told and stop interfering? You could have been killed if this operation had gone wrong!’

Indignant, Corrie opened her mouth to protest – and threw up all over his shoes.

That night, the group’s last dinner on Katastrophos was a long and solemn affair. Of the ten ‘hopeful travellers’ who had assembled around the big olive-wood table at that first dinner two weeks before, only seven remained, hunched morosely down at one end. No one had much of an appetite, which was just as well since Ariadne had taken to her bed, heartbroken, when Professor Gordon had been led away in handcuffs, and both Yanni and Maria were deeply shocked at the disturbing turn of events taking place on their peaceful little island. Gordon was docile and bewildered, muttering plant formulae to himself and shaking his head in disbelief. Jack had simply locked him in his room. Communications with the mainland were now restored and Jack had summoned a police launch which would arrive the next morning, With a bit of luck and some persuasion on Jack’s part, it would take everyone back to the mainland.

When they searched Cuthbert Gordon’s sample-case, they found, among other things, a single airline ticket to Switzerland. As Sid had wryly pointed out, he had hardly intended to use it just to nip over and get the Rolex cleaned. It was his planned escape route. He had also opened a Swiss bank account – presumably to deposit the millions he was confident he would inherit after Diana’s death.

‘Jack, I wish you’d told me poor Lavinia was Cuthbert Gordon’s sister. It was such a shock finding out like that.’ Corrie was still dazed and her stomach was churning volcanically but they had managed to persuade her that neither she nor Diana had been poisoned and now, like everyone else, she was trying to make sense of the whole ghastly nightmare. ‘She was such a lovely lady – warm and generous. He told us why he killed her and why they couldn’t find any poison in her body at the autopsy but
how
did he do it? She died at a charity luncheon. I prepared all the food myself.’

‘And Gordon had a cast-iron alibi. He was in Leicester, lecturing to a hundred botany students when she died. Wasn’t there anything that only she ate?’ Jack asked.

‘No, I served everyone the same meal. Terrine of trout, confit of duck béarnaise and raspberry pavlova, except the poor soul keeled over with stomach pains before she got to the dessert. At first I thought the duck might have been too fatty for her. She’d had her gall bladder out, you see, and always took a dose of medicine before a rich luncheon so it wouldn’t …’ She looked at Jack, horrified. ‘The bastard put it in her medicine.’

‘Almost certainly, only we’ll never get him to admit it now. He’s having trouble remembering his name.’

‘Cuthbert was so certain he’d get Lavinia’s money when she died because he was her only living relative,’ Diana said quietly. ‘He was furious when he found she’d left it to charity. Said she was too stubborn to understand that his research was much more important than giving handouts to scroungers but he wasn’t about to let her stupidity prevent the world from benefiting from his genius.’

‘Now I understand why you came to Lavinia’s funeral,’ Corrie said to Jack. ‘You wanted to see if Cuthbert had the nerve to turn up.’

‘Murderers often do attend the funeral of their victims. He didn’t, of course. By then, he’d moved swiftly on to plan B and was plotting his next murder – you, Diana. The DI who headed up the investigation into Lavinia’s death was positive Gordon had poisoned her but he couldn’t prove it. There was nothing traceable in her system, no motive because he didn’t get her cash and he was miles away when she died. But the DI was convinced from Gordon’s bolshie, arrogant attitude when he was being interviewed that he was completely without remorse and determined to get his scholarship money from somewhere. When we checked your financial situation, Diana, and found out the terms of your pre-nuptial agreement, you were favourite to be his next victim. Then after we discovered he’d booked the trip to Katastrophos, his own private plant reserve, we were really concerned for your safety. But you can’t arrest someone on the grounds that you suspect he might be going to commit a crime. Our hands were more or less tied unless we could catch him in the act.’

Diana nodded. ‘Yeah, I can see that. It was when the Swiss uni started to lean on Cuthbert to hand over the bucks for the research scholarships that he arranged the holiday on Katastrophos. Said he needed to do some final urgent experiments and he needed me to go with him. Now I know what his final urgent “experiment” was going to be.’

‘Why did he want to go to Switzerland particularly?’ Sid wanted to know, thinking only of skiing in freezing snow and a fairly indifferent football team.

‘Because Swiss universities and colleges are linked through the Swiss Science Network which is connected to the European and American networks, so Swiss universities can exchange knowledge at both national and international level. That’s how Cuthbert figured he’d become world famous.’ She glanced at Jack from beneath long lashes. ‘I guess I’m real lucky you were on my case, DI Dawes.’

‘Yes, DI Dawes, it was lucky, wasn’t it?’ Corrie eyeballed him, her tone dangerous. ‘Perhaps now you’d be kind enough to explain which particular piece of luck selected you to take Diana’s case instead of someone else on the squad? Especially when you swore to me you were off duty. Do you remember what you said? “I’ve chosen Katastrophos for our honeymoon, darling, because I know you’ll love it. It’s a romantic island paradise where we can be alone and relax at last”. It’s been about as romantic as a fortnight on Alacatraz!’

‘Actually, Alcatraz is real popular these days.’ Unwisely, Diana hoped to distract Corrie from beating up Jack to whom she felt she owed her life. It was like trying to divert a charging rhino with a carrot. ‘You can go on tours of the Golden Gate Recreation Area. You just get the ferry from San Francisco and—’

‘Shut up, Diana!’ Corrie’s glare silenced her. ‘Go on, Jack. Explain how we fetched up on Katastrophos the exact same fortnight as the professor and Diana? Of course, I might just have believed it was intuition, that you were acting on a hunch, except you don’t believe in all that touchy-feely stuff, do you? Intuition’s unreliable – that’s what you said. The inconsequential fancies of impressionable women.’

Jack looked sheepish. ‘It was the chief super’s idea, sweetheart,’ he protested lamely. ‘He saw I’d put in for two weeks’ leave and suggested it would be a good idea if I spent it on Katastrophos.’

‘Don’t be such a wimp! You could have refused.’

‘But darling, when the DCS “suggests” something, it more or less amounts to an order. I was the obvious choice because Gordon had never seen me. I’d been working on … well, another case when he was being pulled in for questioning.’ He carefully avoided Tina’s eye. ‘The DCS reckoned it was an ideal opportunity to get close to him, find out how he was making the toxins and get samples, so the forensic lads could have a go at them. That was all I planned to do at first. I was convinced he’d set up some kind of lab in the monastery. When it turned out just to be Yanni’s wine scam, I followed Gordon round the island, watched what he did, examined all his samples, there was nothing incriminating. I searched everywhere for the poison we knew he was manufacturing. Except, of course, Ariadne’s ancient clay storage jars. It was only this morning on the beach when Diana told me he went missing from their room most nights and she’d found him in the kitchen a couple of times that I realized where he’d worked on the distillation. That kitchen is such a dump, it never occurred to me it might be suitable for scientific experiments. Of course, Ariadne knew all about it and covered for him. Hid everything away. He told her she was a vital part of his important research and she worshipped him. Sid and I found his stash of poison this morning. We caught Ariadne getting it out of the jar and gibbering on about how the professor was coming soon to collect it.’

‘But I found it the first Tuesday we were here when I took over the cooking!’ Corrie said with horror. ‘And I found the burned-out pots. He must have been boiling stuff up in them for hours.’

‘Explains why nobody got poisoned while you were in charge,’ Sid said grimly. ‘Must have slowed him down a bit, not being able to get into the kitchen and without Ariadne to cover his tracks.’

‘I just thought they were little old bottles of concentrated herbs, something every Greek housewife kept in her store cupboard,’ said Corrie. ‘They smelled disgusting, like rotting vegetables.’

‘Bloody good job you never tasted any of them,’ said Sidney.

‘Or put it in our food,’ added Tim. ‘Although that didn’t help poor Ellie. The hospital said she’s lucky to be alive. And we’ve you to thank for that, Sky.’

‘Please call me Tina. And I’m glad to have been able to help.’ She pushed the untouched food around her plate. She hadn’t looked healthy when she arrived and now she was sallow, silent and very thin, waiting for the police launch next morning and the moment when DI Dawes would snap the handcuffs on her, too. She supposed she should be grateful not to have been confined to her room under house arrest, like the professor.

‘Corrie, why on earth didn’t you tell me you’d found bottles of something odd at the time?’ asked Jack, exasperated at all the time he’d wasted.

‘Because you didn’t tell me you were looking for them! It’s what happens when you keep me in the dark. How was I supposed to guess what was going on? I’m intuitive – not clairvoyant! It’s your own fault.’ Corrie’s stomach rumbled audibly, still suffering from the after effects of all the ouzo forced down her throat.

Sid poured everyone some red wine – rich, fruity and at room temperature. Ironically, he was just starting to get the hang of Diana’s posh life style and now he had to give it up. They were all edgy and in need of a medicinal sedative to get over the shock. Sid needed it to get over Diana. They drank gratefully, even Tina, so he topped them up again.

‘’Course, it was the perfect place for the prof to bump off Diana when you think about it. A plentiful supply of that bulb thing he’d been cross-cultivating for years; no police presence on the island, just a very old priest in charge, and a long enough trip to the mainland for the poison to decompose in the body even when the phones were working and you could call for assistance. The storm was a real bonus. He must have thought Corrie’s Greek gods had blessed him.’ Sid’s expression was bitter. ‘The worst part for me was that he showed absolutely no reaction or guilt when Maria, Ellie and Dobson got poisoned by accident. He just kept on trying. Sorry, Diana, but he was a real callous bastard. If it was down to me, he’d be put away for the rest of his life.’

Everyone had noticed how Sid’s relationship with Diana had changed subtly since he found out she was an heiress and enormously rich. He obviously still adored her but now he was distant, even cool with her. She had been through a terrible, shattering experience and he longed to comfort her, declare his feelings, but now with her husband about to be tried for murder, it would be both presumptuous and crass. People would draw the wrong conclusions – that Sid was after her money. Couldn’t blame them – he’d probably think the same himself. But the worst thing would be if Diana thought it. He couldn’t bear that – wouldn’t risk it. Tomorrow they would go their separate ways and he’d get over her – eventually.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Marjorie, ‘and please forgive me, Diana, this must be awful for you, but why didn’t Professor Gordon just – er – well, do it somewhere private? I mean, he could easily have slipped some poison into his wife’s morning tea when they were in their room instead of risking other people swallowing it by mistake.’

‘He daren’t chance it, Marjorie,’ said Jack. ‘He found out I was a policeman when we arrived because Tina told everyone and he must have realized, eventually, that I was watching him rather more closely than a casual interest in botany warranted. It’s hard to be unobtrusive on such a small island. But he was encouraged by how easily he’d got away with Lavinia’s murder and decided he’d be safe if Diana died somewhere where he couldn’t possible be a suspect, such as up in the monastery, or at dinner where we all helped ourselves from the same dishes, or when she was on the other side of the island eating her picnic lunch. He was cunning, very clever and—’