The Poison People by Alex Makepeace

Author:Alex Makepeace [Makepeace, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Altrove Books
Published: 2018-02-07T07:00:00+00:00

She made it to her island. Kobro caught up with her the day she was cremating Khalid. She had found his part-mummified body in the bed that had once belonged to the elderly couple, now buried out back.

Khalid had obviously spent many of the intervening years knocking together the two seedy shacks and salvaging masonry and timber from the main settlement to make a proud house here, hidden away from the coastline.

To die, she thought, in your own bed. Not so bad. She watched his body blacken then break. She booted a smouldering foot back into the ash.

Kobro came across her largely by accident. He had been following up some cold cases in northern Europe, including Akka’s, which had made it to his desk via a discreet international blood screening programme, and while in Finland decided to check out Oosterholma, not for its connection with her, of which he was unaware, but because of a broader interest in the history of leprosy.

It was spring and the boat dropped him at the harbour, now mostly returned to nature, although the rubble of the old brick commissary was still visible through the long grass.

“Here we have it,” he kept saying to himself as he walked along the path that had once constituted the main street. “Here we have it.” He imagined the once-thriving community, the work the doctors must have done back then. Real pioneers, he thought, at the frontiers of medicine. He would have liked to have been around back then, he thought, before things became so complicated.

He could smell the smoke before he saw it, that whiff of burning pine and barbecue. He followed his nose away from the old town and up, over the hill. There, in a kind of natural basin, the pyre stood in front of a large red wood house. He trotted down the hill, noticed as he went the figure stumbling the other way.

Akka’s foot caught in a rabbit hole and let out an audible snap. Kobro recognised her as he was bending down to attend to her ankle, and jumped right back. Lucky too, because even as she was lying there she had gotten hold of a rock and was about to brain him.

“It was such a big head,” said Akka. “Such an easy target!”

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