“You’re probably right.” For some reason she’d started to giggle. “Sorry, this port has gone right to my head.”

“It’s all right, love. It does you good to let go once in a while.”

Taylor could see two plates of food in front of her now. Her eyelids sagged.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Alice asked her. “You’ve barely touched your food.”

“I feel strange. Suddenly very tired.”

Her legs were now starting to go numb. Alice stood up and stared at her. The expression on her face was quite disturbing. It was a mixture of sympathy and something darker which Taylor couldn’t put her finger on. She had never seen Alice look like this before.

“You saw the ring, didn’t you?”

“What?” It was hard even to say that. It was taking all her energy just to stay conscious.

“Stanley’s ring. You saw it in the drawer, didn’t you?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“Liar. I won’t have liars in my house.”

“I think I’d better be going. I don’t feel well.”

“You’ll go when I say so,” Alice said. “I can’t have anything upsetting the status quo. It was all a bit of a blur at first but when Milly saw Stanley’s wedding ring, it all started to come back. But then I knew a clever girl like you was always going to do a bit of poking around. Did you enjoy the port?”

Taylor stared at the empty glass. “What have you done?”

Alice took out a bunch of keys and put them on the table. Taylor recognised her spare set. “You have trouble sleeping, don’t you?”

Through the fog in her head, Taylor realised she’d been right about the missing sleeping tablets. How many had gone missing? Eight? Ten?

“Why?”

Alice watched her. “I didn’t mean to kill him, you know. They ran around like headless chickens but none of them had a clue. It was quite funny. I can’t have you ruining everything for me now. You’re a clever one, Harriet Taylor, you’d have figured it out sooner or later. You did it sooner, but that isn’t going to be a problem now.”

“What do you mean?”

“You won’t feel a thing. You really ought to wean yourself off those pills, you know. They’ll be the death of you.”

“Alice.” Taylor’s mouth was now incredibly dry. She was starting to drift off and she knew there was no way she could stop herself. She tried to concentrate and stay awake but it was no use. She could only just make out someone coming into the kitchen.

“Alice,” she heard Eddie Sedgewick say, “that’s enough. This can’t carry on. Let’s have a cup of tea and a chat.”

Taylor watched, like she was in a dream, as Alice stood up, picked up the carving knife and went towards her next-door neighbour. Taylor tried to get up but her legs refused to obey her. She saw Eddie’s mouth open but the words that came out made no sense. She saw Eddie pick up a frying pan from the sink and then everything went black.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“Welcome back, sleepyhead,” DI Jack Killian said.

Taylor opened her eyes and flinched. The bright light hurt her. She looked at Killian and frowned.

“Where am I?” she croaked.

“Truro. You’re in hospital. You gave us quite a fright back there.”

“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?”