Seven Years Read online

  Marguerite Scott was still in hospital under observation. Fortunately, her skull hadn’t been fractured, but she was suffering from serious concussion, and she had a hell of a headache. As yet, she hadn’t told the police anything, but it was just a matter of time. Besides, the superintendent told us that they already had plenty of evidence to convict her even if she didn’t confess.

  As regards cause of death, we were informed a little later that the search team had found enough benzodiazepines in Miss Scott’s house to knock out a small army. The superintendent also remarked that, given the amount of blood in the soil around the makeshift graves, she must have dumped the bodies in before cutting their throats, so as not to leave traces of blood in the house. As both George and Barnes had not been dead, but merely unconscious, when they were killed, their hearts had still been working to pump blood from the throat wounds. There were no traces of benzodiazepines in what was left of George’s body after seven years, but the pathologist had hopes of finding traces still in Barnes’s system. Not that it mattered; we could all imagine how she killed her victims. First she incapacitated them with drugs, then she dumped them in a shallow grave and slit their throats before burying them. Nice woman.

  And now I knew why Miss Scott had been worried enough about the inscription I had showed her to risk killing me, too. If the wrong people had found out about it, Barnes Corrigan and his whereabouts would have become an issue. Surely someone somewhere would have missed him. Miss Scott had clearly surmised that I wasn’t going to stop asking questions about the inscription, and she was right to believe that. I knew when I first saw the words that there was a warped and vindictive intelligence behind them, though I will admit I had no idea that I would experience such an abrupt reversal and discover that the most warped and vindictive intelligence in the whole affair lay elsewhere, in the form of Miss Scott herself. My initial analysis had been terribly flawed, seeing the whole thing as a teacher-student relationship and Barnes as the psychopathic intelligence behind it all. But that wasn’t the case at all.

  I would like nothing more than to finish by saying that Alice Langham and I were married in such and such a church on such a such a date, but we weren’t. Alice had no desire to marry again, and I had no objection to our living together, so I sold my little pile of stones up in Ripon and moved into her bijou Lincolnshire cottage. Alice still teaches at Linford School, where she is something of a celebrity, and I still enjoy the occasional day out browsing the second-hand bookshops, only now I examine what I buy far more closely. Sometimes, in these chilly winter evenings, we sit before the crackling fire and, at Alice’s request, I read to her my translations of Ovid. The erotic poems, of course.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Peter Robinson

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4808-8

  This edition published in 2018 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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