Free Mondays are Murder by Tanya Landman

then cling to a rock around the corner? Climb back up once we’d all gone? You’re a survival skills expert, so living outdoors would be no trouble at all. I should have worked that out ages ago. And since then you’ve been hiding out here, picking people off one by one…” I stared at his wrecked face, trying to read his expression. “Why are you doing this? Are you Richard’s cousin? Or his friend?”
    “I’m not his cousin. Not his friend.” Bruce gave a bitter, weird-sounding laugh. “I am him. The man himself. I am Richard Robertson.” He did a low, mocking bow.
    My jaw dropped. I tried to speak but all that came out was a faint, astonished gasp.
    “I suppose you know about the accident in South America?” he continued. “There was an inquest, of course, when they got back. After Mike gave his evidence, Richard Robertson was officially declared dead. I am a ghost, twice over.”
    “But I don’t get it,” I said. “Why didn’t you get in touch with them? How could you leave your friends like that? Thinking you’d died? Missing you…”
    It was like watching a volcanic eruption. Bitterness and hatred poured out like lava. “
Missing
me?
Missing
me? My best friend cut my rope. He left me to die. My pals were so heartbroken they never even bothered to look for me. Do you know what happened, Poppy? Do you want to hear how much I suffered? When I finally recovered consciousness I was at the bottom of a crevasse with a cracked skull, two broken legs and frostbite so bad that I lost half my face to it.” He rubbed his hand across his mutilated features. “This wasn’t caused by bad plastic surgery after a car crash – this was what
they
did to me! I waited for them to come. But when I’d waited and waited and they still didn’t show up I crawled out of that glacier like a worm on my belly, mile after mile down that mountainside. I had to make splints for my own legs. Bandage my own face. When I made it to the base camp, they’d long gone. Do you know what it’s like in that part of the world? Of course you don’t! I went from snow-capped mountains to tropical forest. From savage cold to unbearable heat. Biting insects. Hornets. Mosquitoes. Snakes. Scorpions. I had to forage for grubs. Insects. Larvae. It took me weeks to reach the nearest village – a few huts in a clearing. No medicine. No painkillers. Hardly any food. It was months before I gained enough strength to get to civilization. By the time I came home, I’d been declared dead and my best friend had married my fiancée—”
    “Mike and Isabella,” I said flatly. “So you started to plan your revenge?”
    He gave an acid laugh. “What else could I do?”
    I looked at him. “The way you killed them – it was all to do with what happened to you, wasn’t it? The hot shower that killed Steve Harris – that was like the heat of the jungle. You messed up the thermostat. Wedged the door. Waited. And the same in the freezer that killed Donald – because of your frostbite. You waited until we went out, then you pushed him in. Locked it. Isabella’s poison – was that because of the snakes and scorpions?”
    He didn’t answer directly. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… It wasn’t revenge. It was justice. Isabella knew that. She let me kill her without a murmur. She was grateful.”
    The champagne, I thought. The rose petals. Like a wedding. That was sick. “She thought she had it coming. That you were an avenging spirit.”
    “She always was superstitious,” he murmured.
    “How did you get out of her room?” I asked. “We were right behind her. Why didn’t we see you?”
    “I’m a mountaineer, Poppy. I climbed out of the window.”
    “Of course.” It was so obvious! How could we have missed it? I looked at him and said quietly, “That first night… She went so pale when she saw you. I think she almost recognized you.”
    “But she didn’t, did she?” he spat bitterly. “None of them did. My closest