StillWaters:Book4oftheSophieGreenMysteries by Still Waters Read Free Book Online Page A

tape fluttering in the breeze. Thank God it had stopped raining. I picked my way across the causeway, Norma sniffing about on her own, the heavy metal buckle of her lead hanging ready in my hand. I’d learned this trick when I used to take her for long solo walks when I was younger. I always felt better for having something to defend myself with.
    Could I have taken my gun? Well, yes, but I'd nowhere to put it; I needed my hands free and anyway, I was still kind of scared of it. Besides, I was terrified I’d drop it in the water and break it. It was all right for James Bond to dive underwater with his shooter, but that was on TV. I wasn’t going to risk it backfiring or something.
    I reached the cave and told myself my shivers were just because of the cold. I never got nervous when it was hot.
    The cave was maybe fifteen feet high at the entrance, and from the harbour it looked like it went back about thirty or forty feet, the ground steeply raked, pebbly, punctuated with severed crab claws and bottle tops. The bright beam of the flashlight glinted off the metal of the bottle tops and the glistening wet walls. The place stunk of seaweed and something else, something that was possibly the odour of a drowned body. I’m glad to say it’s not one I’d come across before.
    I ventured in further. The sensible part of me said that it was just a cave, it held nothing scarier than a couple of hermit crabs and some seaweed, but the rest of me, the largest part of me, said, it’s dark and dripping and someone died here. It’s got to be full of monsters and they’re all going to leap out from the shadows and eat your brains.
    Well, in that case, they’d go hungry.
    Norma Jean stayed outside, sniffing and pawing at dead, smelly sea things, while I crept forward, my feet crunching on the pebbles, my breath loud and white in the cold black air. I kept seeing my own shadow reflected back at me and jumped every time.
    I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. The spy part of me (that same little bit that said there were no monsters in the dark) said that tourists didn’t hang themselves a week before Christmas. That there had been something fouler afoot here.
    I didn’t even know who she was. I made a mental note to get in touch with the Cornish authorities (if I ever got any signal on my phone) and find out what they knew. If they knew anything. If they hadn’t already written it off as suicide.
    But I knew…something inside me knew it wasn’t suicide. Female intuition. My spy sense was tingling. I don’t know.
    I was standing in the middle of the cave, looking up at the rows of metal hooks and eyes screwed in the rocky roof. I guess they were some sort of pulley system for when stuff was smuggled up here. I’d have to go to the pub and ask them about it. See if the tunnel was still open.
    I was standing there, aiming the torch up, making a mental to-do list, when quite suddenly, everything went black.

Chapter Four
    There were sounds, somewhere, far away, but all I could feel was peaceful, cold, calmness. Maybe there were lights, too. Voices. I wasn’t sure. It was all so distant.
    And then the calmness receded. I was tumbled and grabbed and many fingers were touching me, probing me, voices were shouting. Cold lips fastened to mine and I tried to fight against it but I was too weak. Pain exploded inside me, my lungs were turning inside out, and I tried to pull myself back down into the blackness, where things were quiet and calm and nothing hurt.
    Bright lights, and there were people talking closer this time. Still so many hands all over me, touching and feeling, people talking to me but I didn’t want to listen.
    And then finally something pulled me up, out of the arms of unconsciousness, presented me to the world and left me, lying in a hospital bed, pale and sick and quite confused.
    “Hi,” said a voice, and I tried to focus my scratchy eyes on someone sitting by my bed. Dark hair. Beautiful eyes.