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It wasn’t the injection itself that was the problem—Santana had plenty of spare syringes and she’d explained that she didn’t need to find a vein—insulin was delivered by injecting it directly into fatty tissue like the stomach or thigh. That would take only seconds to do, and once it was in, the insulin itself was the fast-acting kind that would take effect within ten minutes.
The problem was how to get close enough to Conor to deliver it.
“We could put sleeping tablets into a coconut,” Angel said thoughtfully as we watched Santana trying to copy Zana’s coconut-harvesting technique, climbing up the trunk with her sarong wound around her feet. For the second time, barely halfway up the trunk, she lost her grip, landing with a crash in the undergrowth. A single coconut plopped after her, shaken loose by her fall. It was something, at least.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, and she shook her head with a rueful smile.
“Just bruised my arse, which luckily is fairly padded. How did Zana make it look so easy?”
With the one that had just fallen out of the three, we now had three coconuts. Three short of the two-per-person quota Conor had demanded yesterday in exchange for the water, and that was assuming we could hold off drinking them until evening.
“I don’t know,” I said tiredly. My head was throbbing like a bastard, but I knew that I didn’t have it any worse than Angel or Santana. All I could think about was water. I shook the coconut that had just fallen off the tree, listening to the tantalizing sloshing inside.
“I say we grind the pills,” Angel said, keeping doggedly to the topic, “and put the powder into the hole at the top. Any residue would be hard to taste, Conor would probably think it was just pieces of shell.”
“But isn’t it too much of a risk?” Santana demanded. She sat back on her heels and pushed her hair back from her face. Her cheeks were bright red and the skin on her nose and the backs of her shoulders was peeling horribly. “The pills would be detectable at postmortem.”
“So we feed him to the sharks,” Angel said with a shrug. “Or we claim that he was sleeping badly and I lent him the pills. If it is not sufficient for a lethal dose, it would be hard to prove he didn’t take it himself.”
I shook my head wearily.
“Zana’s never going to go along with that. You know she won’t. She knows full well Conor is sleeping fine and certainly isn’t going to be accepting drugs from any of us.”
“There’s three of us,” Santana pointed out. “If we club together and say that yes, we saw Conor asking Angel for the pills… I mean, that’s three against one, right?”
“Yes, but that one is a pretty compelling one, especially if (a) she’s his girlfriend, and (b) Conor is dead,” I said, trying to keep my tone even.
“So what do you propose?” Angel asked. Her voice was acerbic. “You have pointed out many problems, Lyla, but I don’t hear many solutions.”
I shut my eyes. She was right.
“Okay. Okay, I’m sorry. So what’s the plan, then? We give Conor the drugged coconut, then wait until he’s asleep and creep into the water villa? What if Zana wakes up?”
“We hope she doesn’t?” Santana offered. “I mean, I don’t know what the alternative is. We could drug her too, but that would make her really smell a rat.”
“Or… maybe not?” Angel said. She looked like she was thinking hard. “What if we all wake up the next day and say that we feel terrible and could not wake up. It could be some toxin in the food, or the fish, no? And then if Conor is dead…” She shrugged.
We were all silent, thinking over her plan. It didn’t seem ridiculous.
“What about the camera?” Santana asked at last. “In their villa, I mean. It’ll see us break in.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. In fact, I’d been thinking about it since early that morning, since we’d seen Zana hovering at the window of the water villa. “I think Conor may have taken it down.”
“How do you know?” Angel asked. I shook my head.
“I don’t know for sure, but I stayed there, don’t forget. I remember where the camera was, and I’m pretty certain that when Zana opened the window earlier today, the camera wasn’t there. And I’m not even sure it was there when I went out a few days ago to look for Dan.” I’d been trying to cast my mind back, picture the villa as I’d seen it that night, Conor standing there with the towel around his waist, Zana sitting up in bed, an anxious ghost in the darkness. I couldn’t be sure, but I couldn’t remember seeing the now-familiar white block on the wall to the left of the bed. And I was almost certain it hadn’t been there this morning. It was hard to remember, because my focus had been on Zana, and in keeping my own head above water, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it hadn’t been there. “I think Conor took it down,” I said. “Because he didn’t want anyone seeing what he was doing out there.”
“What he is doing,” Santana said. Her mouth was twisted, as if the words tasted rotten. “To Zana.”
There was a long, long silence.
Then Angel spoke, and this time her voice was hard.
“So. It is agreed, yes? We put half the sleeping pills in a coconut for Conor, and half for Zana. Yes?”
“How many have you got?” Santana asked. “We don’t want to kill Zana by accident.”
“I have six tablets,” Angel said. “I use them only for jetlag, but one is enough for me to sleep like a baby. So three…?” She shrugged.
