Mondays are Murder by Tanya Landman Page B

Isabella regretted it. They weren’t happy, were they? You could see that a mile off. She must have felt guilty. That’s why she acted so weird when all this started to happen. That’s why she said that she and Mike deserved to be punished.”
    “Maybe. But you’d have to be certifiably insane to decide to murder everyone. It was an accident, after all. Mike couldn’t do anything else.”
    “Insane…” I said thoughtfully, remembering how Isabella had been on that first night. “You know, I reckon Isabella was a bit unhinged. It’s like she was expecting people to die: like she thought they deserved it. She wasn’t surprised when Donald fell out of the freezer, was she? And she went back to the house like she was going to her execution. You don’t think Isabella might have done it all?”
    “How do you mean?” asked Graham.
    “Well, suppose she killed the others and then killed herself?” I said.
    Graham grunted in response, and considered the matter. “Suicide… It might be a feasible hypothesis,” he agreed. “After all, there was no sign of an intruder. And yet if Isabella was behind everything why would she leave Mike still standing?”
    “She said she’d had enough up on the mountain. Maybe she tried to kill Mike first and when she didn’t succeed she couldn’t think up another plan. Perhaps she wanted to die and didn’t want to put it off any longer.”
    Graham looked at the photo, pointing to each of the faces in turn. “Richard Robertson fell just like Bruce… Steve Harris was burnt… Donald Shaw was frozen… Isabella was poisoned…” His finger came to Mike. “He’s the only one in this photo left alive now,” he said. “Could he be the killer, do you think?”
    We would have carried on talking but at that moment the stairs creaked. Someone was coming! From the heaviness of the tread, I guessed it was an adult rather than a kid and for a second I was gripped by a paralysing, brain-numbing fear. Then the adrenalin kicked in.
    Hastily we stuffed the newspaper clippings in the scrapbook, put it back on the shelf and switched off the desk lamp.
    “Hide!” I whispered.
    “Where?”
    There was nowhere to go. The desk was nothing more than a table. There wasn’t even an armchair in the room. The only place we could hide was behind the curtains but they were too thin to conceal us properly – we made massive, conspicuous bulges in the fabric, and our feet stuck out at the bottom.
    The footfalls stopped outside the office door. The handle moved slightly as a hand touched it.
    “We’re dead meat!” I gasped.
    But whoever was sneaking around in the middle of the night wasn’t interested in the office. They had merely paused there for a second, resting their weight on the handle: drawing breath, perhaps, or steeling themselves for something.
    After several agonising moments, the soft tread of feet on tiles started again, moving in the direction of the kitchen.
    “We need to get back upstairs,” I said.
    Wordlessly, Graham nodded.
    We tiptoed, groping our way across the dark office. Holding our breath, we eased the door open and crept towards the stairs.
    We had to go right past the kitchen. Terrified, we saw that Mike was in there, his back to us. The freezer door was wide open and the cold air wreathed about him in misty tendrils. The ice-pop corpse of Isabella was laid on the floor, still wrapped in the duvet. Mike’s face was calm as he stroked her hair and said, “It’s over now, my sweet. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? No more guilt, no more pain. You’re at peace now, Isabella. Rest quietly. Sleep for ever.”
    Mad with grief? Or just plain mad?
    Graham and I looked at each other in horror. The icy air from the freezer seemed to drift out into the hall and wrap itself around us when we heard those words. Chilled with fear, we crept noiselessly up the stairs. We parted silently at the top, each of us heading for our own room. But I doubted if either of us would sleep