He went back to the foot of the stairs and crouched down by the dead woman. Her dull eyes looked past him as if hoping for someone more important to enter the room, and her hair was matted with viscous, sticky blood – although there was very little on the floor beneath her head. Curious, he fetched one of the lamps from the museum and placed it on the step beside her body, then gently lifted Mrs Soper’s 226head and examined the wound on her temple. The laceration was ragged and deep, and as he peered more closely in the fitful light, he could see tiny fragments of something – most probably wood or paint – embedded in the skin. He considered the significance of what his eyes were telling him, keeping an open mind to other possible explanations until an expert opinion was available, but one thing now seemed certain: however Emily Soper had died, it wasn’t from an accidental fall down these bare stone steps; a fatal blow to the head was far more likely. He lifted her arms, one after the other, pulling her sleeves back to examine the skin; there was no sign of bruising from an attempt to defend herself, suggesting that the attack had taken her completely by surprise, but that was the only blessing he could find. Her skin was grey and cold to the touch, with rigor well developed, and had he been forced to hazard a guess at the time of death, he would have put it at several hours before Richard Hartley.

Penrose stood up and looked round for a possible murder weapon, but there was nothing immediately obvious in this bizarre collection of dead animals and Victorian mourning dolls, all waiting to be repaired, and neither could he find anything remotely out of place in either of the upstairs rooms. The museum might hold more possibilities, but he was wasting time with uneducated guesses when everything he needed to know for the time being had already been established: there were two suspicious deaths on the island, not one. It was reasonable to suppose that they might be connected, but for the life of him he couldn’t see how.

He knelt quietly again by Mrs Soper’s body, as if respect could help him to find an answer to his questions, but it only served to deepen his sadness. It never ceased to amaze him, 227this indefinable but crippling sense of rage that he was capable of feeling for a stranger – shamefully more powerful than the emotions which underpinned many of his longstanding friendships – but he clung to it as the essence of who he was, and he knew that if it ever let him down, it would be time to concede defeat.

When he was ready to leave, he blew out the lamp and went back to the museum to collect the photograph albums from the counter where he had left them. The smell that he had noticed there before and thought nothing of now seemed more significant – a faint but unmistakable odour of disinfectant. The floor had obviously been recently washed, and he knelt down to look for any evidence that might have been missed; the cleaning was a reasonably thorough job, but he knew how difficult it was to eradicate everything and his patience was soon rewarded by a spatter of blood on the wall, and other marks on the floor leading through to the back room. No doubt a proper forensic examination would reveal more, but Penrose was satisfied for now that regardless of where Mrs Soper had been found, the attack had taken place here, at the counter.