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Chapter Eighteen

Yanni called in backup, which came in the form of Dove, a petite bird shifter who’d been a couple of years below me at school, and a coroner who looked at least three hundred years old. He may very well have been.

‘Hi.’ Dove gave me a friendly smile and offered me her hand to shake. ‘Nice to meet you, Beatrix! I’d actually made you some cupcakes as a “welcome to the team” gift, but they’re back at the office.’ She grimaced. ‘No one wants cupcakes with a side order of dead body.’

I smiled. ‘That was the right decision. And I’ll totally eat some later when my stomach has stopped roiling.’

Dove nodded. ‘I hear you. Dead bodies always make my tummy feel wobbly.’

‘Yeah. They’re not my favourite thing.’ There was so much blood, and the corpse had me flashing back to the still forms of my parents. No, dead bodies did not make me happy .

‘A single bullet wound to the back of the head,’ Yanni muttered. ‘With a silver bullet. Whoever did this either sneaked in so Warren didn’t see them, or it was someone he trusted enough to turn his back on.’

‘I can’t believe there’s been a murder in Witchlight Cove.’ Dove let out her breath in a sharp whistle. ‘Usually the dead bodies we go to are the old dears who’ve passed in their sleep. And after the goings-on yesterday at the fayre, too! It feels like the place is going to pot – I dread to think what might happen next.’

‘We don’t need to think about what happens next, we need to deal with what we’ve got now,’ Yanni barked reproachfully. ‘We need to comb the area, see if there are any clues.’

By now we were all wearing bootees over our shoes and had snapped on gloves. We’d tied back our hair, and Yanni had asked Eva to move away from the scene so it wasn’t contaminated with the golden strands that frequently fell from her coat. Reluctantly, Eva had agreed.

‘It looks like there was a party here,’ I said as I moved towards the front of the boat. I was sure it had a proper name like hull, or deck, or something like that but I’m not – and never will be – a boaty person. But this was clearly where someone had been entertaining: there were several empty bottles of wine and glasses littered about .

‘The murderer’s fingerprints could be on one of those, couldn’t they?’ I asked.

‘Yes – along with those of half the other people in the village. Including mine,’ Dove replied with a grimace.

My eyebrows rose in surprise.

‘Warren always holds a big party on the night of the fayre,’ she explained. ‘I was at school with his daughter, Jennifer, so I usually get an invitation. I didn’t stay for long, though – I was too busy and Samuel isn’t good with crowds. He’s my husband,’ she added.

‘Warren held a party even though he’d been taken into hospital?’ I asked incredulously.

‘He’d already paid for the caterers and entertainers,’ Dove said. ‘He’s really sensible with his money. There’s no way he would have been happy letting all that go to waste.’

‘I don’t think we should assume the murderer was one of the partygoers,’ the coroner said as he examined the body. ‘This happened recently.’

‘How recently?’ Yanni asked.

‘An hour ago, tops. He’s still warm.’

A chill ran down my spine: we must have just missed the killer! At least we didn’t have to bag up all the glasses and bottles for fingerprint testing, though. That would have taken hours.

‘We need to find out who had an axe to grind with Mr Storcrest,’ Dove commented.

My pulse rocketed as a thought occurred to me and I turned to Yanni in panic. ‘You can’t be considering that Mrs D did this!’ I said firmly.

‘All I’m interested in is what the evidence tells us,’ Yanni said. ‘And right now, we know that Mrs Drakefield had already tried to harm our victim. Like it or not, that makes her a prime suspect.’

Refusing to accept what she was saying, I shook my head. ‘Mrs D wouldn’t do this – she wouldn’t murder someone. The poisoning was an accident. And why would she confess to poisoning Storcrest and then kill him? That would make her the worst murderer ever!’

‘I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve seen a lot of idiocy in my day. The fact that it’s foolish doesn’t rule her out, Bea.’ Despite her words, Yanni’s tone was gentle. ‘You think you know her but you don’t. You haven’t known her for a decade, and before that you knew her as a child knows a teacher, through rose-tinted glasses. She’s lived a very long life and we don’t know what that has involved.’

I knew everything she was saying was true but my gut refused to accept that Mrs D could possibly be the killer. I was a PI; I had good gut instincts – and I bloody well knew that Mrs D wouldn’t do something like that.

We were still talking when Eva barked loudly. We all looked at my retriever, who was looking pointedly inland. ‘There’s someone up at the house.’ Dove pointed to a silhouette in one of the windows.

‘Go see who that is,’ Yanni said to me. ‘And tell them they can’t come down here. It’s a crime scene.’

Eva had been sitting on the jetty guarding us the entire time; given how much she liked to doze, I was impressed she’d stayed awake for so long. ‘Come on, girl,’ I told her. ‘You can help me.’

Tail wagging, she jumped up to follow me as I moved across the lawn towards the house and the mysterious intruder.