The Killing Of Polly Carter
Robert Thorogood
Supermodel Polly Carter was famed for her looks and party-girl lifestyle. Now she's dead, apparently having thrown herself from the clifftop near her home on the island of Saint-Marie. Those who knew her say Polly would never have killed herself…and when he is called in to investigate, DI Richard Poole is inclined to agree there is more to Polly’s death than meets the eye.Already fighting a losing battle against the intense summer heat of the Caribbean, Richard now faces fresh adversaries: a stream of alibis; a host of conflicting motives; and, worst of all, a visit from his mother. A frenzy which would surely allow a murderer to slip away unnoticed…yet Richard is certain that the guilty party is still on the island.As his team closes in on Polly’s household, Richard becomes convinced that the model’s death was an inside job. And he's determined to prove who planned the killing of Polly Carter, and why…
About the Author (#ulink_4e582580-9282-5d7d-9752-a844b4daa1c5)
ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC One TV series, Death in Paradise.
He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1972. When he was 10-years old, he read his first proper novel – Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House – and he’s been in love with the genre ever since.
He now lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire with his wife, children and an increasingly cranky Bengal cat called Daniel.
ISBN: 978-1-474-03809-6
THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER
© 2015 Robert Thorogood
Published in Great Britain 2015
by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
Version: 2018-07-23
For Charlie and James
Table of Contents
Cover (#uc86a8f86-ec34-5644-8bbc-17e7f0199fed)
About the Author (#u17b92af4-5e85-5955-b69b-dbbefdcf573d)
Title Page (#u7300e6ff-8e53-5330-8860-f9c1c7b0d01d)
Copyright (#u3f1ad9e6-e15b-53d6-8666-2d584a706cc0)
Dedication (#ua6661ba1-dd33-50f6-9987-43f5237e8bfa)
Prologue (#uda15fefb-67bb-559d-97f9-98dc35a6fedc)
Chapter 1 (#u5d1d948b-1c7c-58fa-83b2-1ed60ec93487)
Chapter 2 (#u1ffcef4f-3e94-5f53-b10e-33674abb37b4)
Chapter 3 (#uaec29958-723e-5aba-9328-e8495c28e624)
Chapter 4 (#u6d518f00-b94c-50c9-9ace-1156e3012191)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_3350f5e8-4d85-5338-975e-d51f2e64f1ff)
Detective Inspector Richard Poole sat on the verandah of his beachside shack looking up at the cloudless Caribbean sky in inarticulate outrage.
A passing parrot had just crapped in his cup of tea.
It didn’t seem possible, but Richard had watched the little bugger fly in over the sea and defecate in mid-air, the little ball of released guano flying in a perfect parabola only to land in his English Breakfast Tea with an accuracy, Richard realised, that Barnes Wallis could only have dreamed of.
In a spasm of disgust, Richard sloshed the contents of his china cup over the balustrade and tried to return his attention to the book he’d been reading. It was an old hardback he’d found at the back of the police station called A Field Guide to the Insects of the Caribbean, and he’d been fascinated by what he’d so far been able to learn from it. For example, he’d had no idea that the brightest bioluminescent insect in the world wasn’t in fact the firefly, but was a species of click beetle that lived in the Caribbean called the Fire Beetle.
But it was no good, Richard couldn’t settle back into his book, and instead he found himself glancing nervously back up at the sky every few seconds. After all, what if another parrot came for him out of the sun? Richard sighed heavily to himself. Honestly, when you got down to it, the Caribbean was a bloody nightmare from start to finish.
It didn’t help that he had already been in a bad mood that morning, even before the aerial bombardment. This was because Richard had a secret. A deep and dark secret he’d not even dared mention to his team yet. In fact, as he went through to the little galley kitchen at the back of his shack to wash up his tea things, Richard decided that there surely couldn’t have been another person on the whole island of Saint-Marie who was having as miserable a morning as him.
But he was wrong. There was someone.
This was because, just a few miles further along the coastline, a woman called Polly Carter was sitting in her kitchen wearing a bright yellow summer dress, drinking a freshly pressed glass of mango juice, and smoking a cigarette—and although she didn’t know it yet, she only had a few minutes left to live.
Polly was forty years old and a fashion model famous the world over for a look that in person could come across as gawky inelegance, but, in photographs, translated into a gap-toothed beauty. Her face had adorned billboards, magazine covers, and a rock group had once written a chart-topping record lionising her looks. Not that Polly took much notice of the hubbub that surrounded her life any more. She’d been trawling up and down catwalks since she was twenty-two years old, she’d earned more money than she’d ever dreamed—had spent even more—and all she wanted now was a break from it all. Which, ironically, she was about to get.
The door to the kitchen banged open, and Polly’s wheelchair-bound sister Claire was pushed into the room by her nurse, Sophie.
Claire and Polly were twins, although Claire was the older of the two by a few minutes. This should have created a special bond between the two sisters, but Claire was one of those older siblings who felt that it was her seniority that defined her entire relationship with her sister. So, because Polly was naturally impetuous, irresponsible, and had a wicked sense of humour, Claire was superior, overly responsible and felt that life was nothing to laugh about. This outlook was sharpened further by the fact that, following a riding accident ten years ago, Claire no longer had the use of her legs. It was no consolation to Claire that although she and her sister were non-identical, she was blessed with an uncanny beauty very similar to her famous sister’s. But then, as Claire would remark to anyone who cared to listen, her and her sister Polly’s supposed good looks only ever seemed to become apparent in fashion photographs, and who ever took fashion photographs of a cripple?
‘Well this is a first, you’re already up,’ Claire said to Polly as Sophie finished pushing her over to the breakfast bar.
‘Is that so surprising?’ Polly asked, briefly thrown by her sister’s tone.
‘Well, you don’t normally get up before lunchtime, so yes, I’d say it was a surprise.’
Polly was affronted.
‘I don’t just laze about all day, you know.’
‘Oh you don’t, do you?’ Claire said with a disdainful laugh, and Polly looked at her sister a long moment before—very slowly—plucking another cigarette from the battered pack on the table and lighting it.
Once she’d taken a long, rasping drag from her cigarette, Polly said, ‘Look, if you must know, I only got up this morning so I could spend some time with you.’
‘Ha! Well, that’s a first,’ Claire said, still unable to take her sister at all seriously.
Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel, was used to how Claire bickered with her sister Polly—and vice versa—so she tuned the two women out while she made some coffee for herself and Claire. It wasn’t in her job description to make drinks for her client, but Sophie had soon learnt that Claire was one of those people who not only expected her nurse to push her wheelchair and help with all of the tasks she wasn’t capable of doing herself, but she also felt that Sophie should act as her personal assistant and lackey.
Once Sophie had pushed the plunger down on the cafetière, she turned back to the room only to see Polly wheeling Claire out of the kitchen door and into the garden.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ Sophie asked the sisters before they left the room.
‘No thanks,’ Claire said. ‘Polly says she wants to take me for a walk in the garden.’
‘You do?’ Sophie said, surprised. She and Claire had been house guests of Polly’s for the last ten days, and Polly hadn’t once offered to push her sister’s wheelchair in all that time.
‘I do,’ Polly said with a tone that made it clear she expected Sophie to back off.
Sophie didn’t want to get in between the two sisters, but pushing a wheelchair wasn’t easy.
‘No, really,’ she said. ‘Let me push Claire for you.’
‘I said I’d be fine,’ Polly said, irritation flashing in her eyes.
Sophie looked at Claire for guidance, but Claire just shrugged. She didn’t seem to care one way or another. So Sophie kept silent as Polly pushed her sister out into the garden.
Once she’d been left on her own, Sophie finished pouring herself a cup of coffee, left the kitchen and went into the main hallway of the house. It was a large space with a wide wooden staircase that swept up to a minstrel’s gallery that went around all four walls of the house, and led onto the various bedrooms, bathrooms and private suites upstairs.
But as she entered the hallway, Sophie hung back in the shadows because Polly’s agent, Max Brandon, was already heading up the stairs, a bunch of files and papers clutched in his hands. Max was a thin man in his early fifties who was wearing round sunglasses with yellow lenses, a midnight-blue velvet jacket and burgundy cord trousers, and Sophie suspected he dyed his hair to keep it so lustrously black.
Sophie didn’t much like him, but she made herself say, ‘Good morning, Max,’ to his retreating back. Fortunately for Sophie, Max didn’t hear her—or pretended that he didn’t hear her—and she watched him head up to the top of the stairs and disappear, she presumed, to his bedroom. Sophie was about to head for the stairs herself when she heard a shout from outside.
It sounded like a woman’s voice.
Sophie looked through the large picture windows that overlooked the garden and saw Polly standing at the far end of the lawn shouting at Claire in her wheelchair. Sophie couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but it was clear that Polly was angry with her sister about something.
Sophie knew that while it was one thing for the sisters to be irritable in each other’s company, it was quite another for the able-bodied Polly to take her wheelchair-bound sister into the garden and then start shouting at her.
There was a doorway in the corner of the hall that led straight onto the garden and Sophie went through it to see if she could intervene, but as soon as she crunched out onto the gravel path outside, Polly looked over at her. She then grabbed hold of the handles of Claire’s wheelchair and pushed her further into the garden, soon disappearing beyond a large clump of bushes.
Sophie briefly hesitated. Polly’s house—mansion, really—was built high on a bluff above the ocean, and Sophie knew that the direction that Polly had taken Claire led to a sheer cliff face that protected a horseshoe-shaped bay and private beach far below. Sophie started across the lawn, but before she’d even gone half a dozen steps she very distinctly heard Claire shout ‘Stop it!’ from beyond the bushes.
Sophie looked back at the house. Had no one else heard or seen anything? It was hard to see if anyone was even looking out, such was the glare of reflected sunshine from the windows, but Sophie caught a movement at one of the upstairs windows. Someone was looking out at the garden, even though this person was in shadow, and she couldn’t quite tell who it was.
A woman’s scream pierced the air. Sophie’s head whipped round. The scream had come from beyond the bushes in the direction of the cliff.
Sophie then very distinctly heard Claire shout, ‘Oh dear God, someone help!’
Sophie broke into a run, and, as she got past the bushes, she could see Claire sitting in her wheelchair over by the top of the cliff where steps led down the cliff face to the beach below.
As for Polly, she was nowhere to be seen.
‘Help me!’ Claire screamed as Sophie approached. ‘She just jumped!’
Claire turned her wheelchair away from Sophie and started racing off along the curve of the cliff’s edge as it swept around the bay.
‘What’s going on?’ Sophie asked as soon as she caught up with Claire.
‘I couldn’t follow her, she ran down the steps!’
As Sophie looked down to the beach far below, she finally understood why Claire had been pushing herself so desperately along. It was only this far around the curve of the cliff top that it was possible to look back and see the stone steps that ran in loose zig-zagging flights from the top of the cliff all the way down to the private beach a hundred or so feet below.
There was a body lying in the sand at the base of the cliff.
A body that was wearing the same bright yellow dress that Polly Carter had been wearing only moments earlier.
Sophie turned to look at Claire and saw that she was physically shaking, and her eyes were wide and staring as she replied, ‘She said I was evil, she said I’d ruined her life …’ Claire took a sharp intake of breath to allow herself to finish her sentence. ‘She said she was going to end her life.’
‘What?’
‘She said it was all my fault. That she was going to end her life. And then she ran down the steps and jumped!’
Sophie knew that Claire could wait. As a trained nurse, she was needed elsewhere.
‘Don’t move,’ she said, before starting to sprint back along the cliff top, her breath loud in her ears as she pumped her arms hard, knowing that every second of delay could be critical. She had to get to Polly.
Reaching the stairs that led down to the beach, Sophie didn’t stop to think, she just barrelled down them—taking the uneven stone steps two at a time as she careened down the cliff, her arms out wide for balance, until her flip-flopped feet finally slapped onto the hard white sand far below.
Sophie took a moment to recover her breath. She then looked around to see if there was anyone nearby who could help, but the beach was entirely empty, perhaps unsurprisingly so. At this time in the morning, everyone else was almost certainly back at the house.
But Sophie could see that the body in the yellow dress was lying near the base of the cliff about thirty feet away.
It was Polly. And she wasn’t moving.
Sophie strode across the sand as quickly as she could, but even as she approached the body, she could see that Polly’s legs were splayed at an almost unnatural angle—she had an arm jammed under her body—and her eyes were closed.
Sophie bent down, put two fingers to Polly’s neck and tried to find a pulse.
There wasn’t one.
Sophie gulped.
She stepped back, looked back up to the top of the cliff and saw the tiny figure of Claire still looking down from her wheelchair.
Sophie cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted up, ‘We need an ambulance! At once!’
At the same time that Claire pushed herself back to the house and Sophie turned the body of Polly Carter over to see if she could begin to administer CPR, Richard Poole was inside his shack having a shower. Or rather, in a world where the shower mixer provided him with periods of cold water interspersed with impossible-to-judge periods of water so hot it could sear skin, he was trying to time his dips into the shower so that he could wash his hair without getting third-degree burns. And it was just as he was waiting for the next pulse of boiling water to hit him—with his eyes scrunched up against the shampoo already dripping down his face—that Richard felt something skitter up his leg and then stop at his knee.
Richard froze.
There was a creature on his leg. And he was completely naked. His hand reached ever-so-slowly for his towel so he could wipe the soap from his eyes and finally see what stinging scorpion or venomous spider had just run up his leg. But before he could reach his towel, the creature started running upwards again and Richard opened his eyes against the screaming pain of soap, saw a bright green lizard racing up his thigh—a lizard that Richard had been sharing his shack with ever since he’d first arrived on the island, and who, in more innocent times, he’d thought it would be amusing to name Harry—but before the creature could reach the danger area of Richard’s groin, he grabbed up his towel, swiped, missed, slipped on some soap, and fell arse over tip to the floor.
As Richard lay bruised and panting on the floor of his shower room under a stream of water that was sometimes freezing cold and at other times boiling hot, the sting of soap still in his eyes, and with a crushing sense of defeat from being once again outwitted by a reptile only eight inches long, he decided that yes, now he was surely the unluckiest person on the whole island of Saint-Marie that day.
And he was still wrong. Because that honour belonged to the world-famous supermodel, Polly Carter.
Because it was the day she was pushed from the top of a cliff, fell nearly a hundred feet to the hard sand below, and broke her spine and neck on impact, dying instantly.
It was the day Polly Carter was murdered.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_ad472f1a-f526-59d3-8f75-f2621bae2afc)
Richard Poole’s dark secret was that his mother Jennifer was about to arrive on the island. Why on earth she’d chosen to visit on her own, Richard had no idea, but he also had no idea how he was going to get through two weeks of keeping her company, and that seemed the more pressing problem.
It’s not that Richard didn’t like his mother. In fact, if he interrogated his feelings, he knew that he must even love her, it’s just that she was so perfect that he found her company exhausting. Her clothes were perfect, her friends were perfect, her whole life was perfect. She didn’t complain, she didn’t even express her feelings as far as Richard could tell, she just got up before everyone else, did more than everyone else, and then retired to bed once she’d done all the cleaning and tidying up and made sure that everyone else had turned in first.
If even a single thread stuck up from any of the immaculate plush carpets in her home, Jennifer would get down on her hands and knees and use nail scissors to give the individual thread a haircut. And after she did the washing up—always wearing washing-up gloves, of course—she’d then put on a second pair of washing-up gloves so that she could wash up the first set of washing-up gloves—unaware, Richard thought, that she risked falling into a logical feedback loop where she spent the rest of her life washing up the gloves she’d just used to wash up in. When Richard had tried to explain this to his mother, she’d smiled delightedly–‘You’ve always been so clever, darling’—and then gone off to plump up sofa cushions with her bare fists.
It was fair to say that Richard had a complicated relationship with his mother.
Far more so, in fact, than he did with his father. After all, his father, Graham—a one-time Superintendent in the Leicestershire Police Force—was entirely consistent in how he handled his son. No matter what Richard did, it always left his father disappointed. What was more, Graham was always the first to point that he’d done the same thing as Richard, but much better—or at an earlier age—or he’d chosen to go down a different path entirely.
So, when Richard was the first member of his family to be sent to private school, his father had managed to give the impression that it was only because no one thought Richard was clever enough to get into the local state-funded grammar school, where Graham had himself gone. And as top scholar—a fact Graham managed to mention nearly every time he was alone with his son, which, if truth being told, wasn’t that often.
Seven years later, when Richard got a place at Cambridge University, he finally felt that he’d proven to his father that he did indeed have a brain, but on the one occasion that Graham Poole visited his son in the three years he was there, Graham spent the day pronouncing that he himself had of course gone to the ‘University of Life’ where he’d learnt the real lessons in life, got the rough edges knocked off him quicker, and he’d not turned out too badly, had he?
When Richard announced that he was going to join the police force—as his father had done—Graham had sucked air in through his teeth as though Richard was making a very brave choice indeed. And then, when Richard threw a party to celebrate his promotion to Detective, his father was too busy at a local Rotary event to attend. His mother came, though, and did the buffet beforehand and hoovering afterwards.
In short, Richard would have been hard pressed to know which of his two parents he’d have more difficulty spending two weeks with: his dad, who always looked at him with such disappointment; or his mum, who always looked at him with such hope.
There was a loud honk from outside his shack and Richard snapped out of his reverie. His mother wasn’t due to arrive on the island until later that afternoon, so who was that outside trying to get his attention? The car horn honked again. And, before Richard could even get up, it honked again another two times.
Richard’s shoulders sagged. There was only one person on the whole island who’d so rudely interrupt his peace like this, so he went through his galley kitchen and opened the back door. Or rather, he tried to open the back door, but, as was typical, it was jammed shut by a build-up of sand on the other side. This was merely one of the almost infinite number of ways that the Caribbean tried to spoil his entire existence, Richard knew. All it took was a light breeze and a sunny day to loosen the individual grains of sand on the beach—and it was always a bloody sunny day—and whole dunes would start to build up against the walls of his shack.
Giving the door a proper shove with his shoulder, Richard finally got the door moving, the whole lean-to annexe to his shack shuddering as he finally managed to scrape the door open.
Richard briefly flinched at the sudden burst of sunlight—he never got used to how much sunshine there was in the Caribbean—but he saw that his initial suspicions had been correct. Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey was waving a happy hello to him from the driver’s seat of the battered police Land Rover.
Camille’s skin glowed in the sunshine, her hair was glossy and untamed, and she wore an electric-blue vest top, but Richard didn’t much notice any of this, if only because he knew that the staff rota had Camille down as having a day off, so why had she turned up at his shack?
‘Careful of that sand, sir!’ Camille said with mock seriousness as he awkwardly picked his way across it. ‘It might get into your socks.’
Richard knew that Camille found it incomprehensible that he insisted on wearing a dark woollen suit, polished shoes, a white shirt and a tie in the tropics, but, for him, the matter was a simple one. A policeman wore a dark suit, and Richard didn’t see why he should have to lower his standards just because he’d been posted to the Caribbean.
‘What are you doing here?’ Richard asked.
‘Oh, and a good morning to you, too,’ Camille said, now a lot less jauntily.
‘But it’s your day off,’ Richard said, unable to stop himself from glancing at his wristwatch to make sure his mother hadn’t in fact landed on the island yet.
‘What’s up?’ Camille asked, sharp as a knife, and Richard cursed silently to himself. His subordinate never missed a thing.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said with what he hoped was insouciance.
‘Why are you looking so guilty?’
‘I’m not looking guilty.’
‘You are.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’
There was a long pause while both of them realised that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere.
‘I’m not,’ Richard said.
‘You are.’
‘Look,’ Richard said. ‘Much as I’d love to continue this game of “You are, I’m not”, can you please tell me what on earth you’re doing at my house on your day off?’
Camille’s jaw set in instant irritation, and Richard wondered what he’d done wrong this time. As ever, he found Camille’s inner thoughts impossible to divine. On the one hand this was because she was female, spontaneous, passionate and always wanted to think the best of people, and—on the other hand—it was because she was French, which, Richard felt, was what military analysts would very much call a ‘force multiplier’. So, as Richard stood sweating on the white sand in his Marks & Spencer suit, he genuinely didn’t know how he’d managed to cause offence, and had even less of an idea about how to mend the situation.
‘Okay,’ Camille eventually said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m doing here, but on the condition you tell me what that book is.’
Camille indicated the book in Richard’s hand. He’d picked it up just before he’d left his shack. It was his intended lunchtime reading.
‘Oh this?’ Richard said, only now realising that the book wouldn’t be that easy to explain. ‘It’s just a … you know, a field guide to the insects of the Caribbean.’
Camille’s eyebrows rose at this news. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I, um, I found it at the station, and I thought it would be fun to learn about the insects of the Caribbean.’
‘You thought it would be fun?’
‘Yes.’
‘Learning about the insects of the Caribbean?’
‘Anyway, I’ve told you what I’m reading. You’ve now got to tell me why you’re here.’
‘Oh,’ Camille said, as though it were of no consequence. ‘There’s been a suspicious death.’
‘What?’ Richard blurted.
Camille grinned, and said, ‘Sorry. Should I have said sooner?’
Richard dashed round to the passenger side of the police jeep, opened the door and climbed in.
‘Yes you bloody well should have said sooner!’ he huffed, belting himself into the passenger seat as fast as he could.
Camille watched her boss make sure that his buckle was properly clicked into its housing, then check there were no twists in the belt itself as it went over his shoulder, before then giving two tugs on the strap to confirm that the auto-lock mechanism was indeed working satisfactorily.
‘Come on,’ he said impatiently. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Camille couldn’t help but smile to herself as she put the jeep into a low gear and drove off across the bumpy sand in the direction of the main road.
As Richard walked into Polly Carter’s house for the first time, he sneezed. This was because it may have been a grand villa in a stunning jungle setting—with orange-painted shutters to the windows, a bright blue front door and a red-tiled roof—but it was as messy as hell on the inside, and everything was covered in dust. Artefacts from Polly’s world travels, random pieces of furniture, local artworks and stacks of old magazines, books and photos were piled pell-mell so that sharp-edged Perspex awards sat next to ancient tribal masks, the antique dining table had modernist chrome chairs arranged around it, and the walls were just as crammed with modern collages as they were with faded oil paintings.
But it was only when Camille showed Richard the garden that he knew the meaning of true horror, because he discovered that the house was built near a cliff, and he was now expected to walk down the stone steps that had been carved into it so he could reach the body on the beach below.
‘But there’s no safety rail!’ he said as he stood looking at the Health and Safety nightmare that lay ahead of him.
‘Come on,’ Camille said. ‘We need to get to the body. And it’s not as bad as it looks.’
Richard looked at the stone steps again and saw that maybe Camille had a point. They were roughly hewn, but they were a good four or five feet wide. What’s more, although there was a vertical drop to almost certain death if you fell over the edge, there was actually a little escarpment of dirt and scrubby bushes and thorns running along the edge of the stairs to give the appearance of safety. And to divide the challenge into more manageable chunks, Richard could see that the whole staircase doubled back on itself four or five times as it wound its way down the cliff face. In fact, Richard realised, even if he fell over the edge, there’d be a chance he’d perhaps have his fall broken by the stone steps on the flight of stairs directly beneath.
In conclusion, Richard decided, it was scary, but he could do it. It helped, of course, that he was wearing such sensible shoes, he kept telling himself in a repeated mantra as, arms wide, he took six or seven minutes to pick his way down to the beach far below.
Once there, Richard could see, with relief, that Sergeant Fidel Best and Police Officer Dwayne Myers were already working the scene. Or rather, he was relieved to see that Fidel was working the scene. Richard’s feelings towards Dwayne were a little more nuanced. This was because, whereas Fidel was young, fresh-faced and lived and breathed correct police procedure, Dwayne had been on the force a number of decades, had refused every offer of promotion in all that time, and felt that following correct procedure was for ‘other people’. For Dwayne, in fact, his work was only partly about catching criminals, because it was also about making sure he knocked off on time so he could take one of his many and apparently concurrent girlfriends out partying every night. And the problem for Richard was, much as he’d like to chastise Dwayne for his lax attitudes, on an island like Saint-Marie, it was often Dwayne who got the results, if only because he drank in the same bars as the island’s dealers, grifters and general ne’er-do-wells. And, more improbably, he was accepted by them, to Richard’s eternal frustration.
Richard saw that there was a churn of footprints in the sand that led from the bottom of the stone steps to the body—and a similar mess of footprints around the body where Fidel and Dwayne were working the scene—but there weren’t any other footprints on the beach leading to or from the body. In fact, Richard could see, there weren’t any footprints anywhere else on the beach. In particular, there weren’t any footprints leading to or from the gently lapping sea in any way.
Having noted this, Richard said his hellos to Dwayne and Fidel and got down on his haunches to inspect the body. There was white sand stuck to the dead woman’s cheek and hair, but he also noticed that, apart from that, her face seemed almost entirely undamaged.
‘Sir,’ Fidel said. ‘You do recognise her, don’t you?’
‘The victim?’ Richard asked.
‘Told you,’ Dwayne said with a deep chuckle.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘I know it’s a bit disrespectful, but Dwayne here said he didn’t think you’d recognise the victim, and I said that you would.’
Richard looked at his team and once again marvelled at how often he seemed to operate in an alternate universe to them all.
‘What on earth are you both talking about?’ he asked.
‘You really don’t recognise her?’ Camille asked, just as surprised.
‘No I don’t,’ Richard snapped. ‘Because if I did recognise her, I’d have said that I did, wouldn’t I? But I didn’t, so I didn’t.’
‘It’s Polly Carter,’ Camille said.
‘Right. Good. And who’s she?’
‘You really don’t know who Polly Carter is?’
Richard jutted his jaw out. He didn’t want to have to say it again.
‘Okay,’ Dwayne said, happy to act as peacemaker. ‘She’s one of the most famous supermodels in the world. And you’ve not heard of her?’
Richard looked at the body. He looked up again.
‘Can’t say that I have. Now,’ he said, suddenly wanting to move the conversation on, ‘could someone please tell me what we’ve got so far?’
Dwayne was grinning as Fidel flipped his notebook open.
‘Well, sir, so the victim’s name is Polly Carter. She’s a top model. Or was. She’s British by birth, and she’s in the papers the whole time. She parties hard, gets into fights, and she’s got houses around the world, but lives on Saint-Marie most of the year. There are a number of guests staying with her at the moment, but I’ve only managed to speak to a woman called Sophie Wessel so far. She’s a nurse for Polly’s twin sister.’
‘Polly’s got a twin sister?’ Richard asked.
‘That’s right. Her name’s Claire Carter. And her nurse, Sophie, said that Claire and Polly were in the garden together at about ten o’clock this morning when the two sisters started having an argument. Sophie doesn’t know what it was about. But when she heard a scream, she went to find out what was going on and found Claire—upset—at the top of the cliffs, and Polly Carter dead—just here—on the sand below.’
‘Any suggestion that Claire maybe pushed her sister off the cliff?’
‘That’s unlikely,’ Fidel said. ‘Claire’s in a wheelchair. I don’t see how she could overcome an able-bodied person. And, according to Sophie, Claire’s saying Polly had just announced that she was going to commit suicide before she ran down the cliff steps and threw herself to her death.’
‘She did?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, looking down at the body of Polly Carter as she lay twisted in death on the sand. Richard couldn’t help but notice how at peace her face looked. Almost as if she were only sleeping. Richard looked up at the cliff that loomed above the body and tried to guess at the state of mind someone would have to be in before they could jump to their death like this. Despite the heat, Richard shivered.
‘And were there any other witnesses to this suicide?’
‘I don’t believe any of the other house guests were nearby at the time, sir.’
‘Then can you tell me who the other house guests are?’
‘Of course,’ Fidel said, turning to another page in his notebook. ‘There’s Polly’s twin sister Claire Carter, I’ve mentioned her. Sophie Wessel is her nurse. She’s been hired from an agency in London for the duration of the holiday. Then there’s Max Brandon, Polly’s agent and manager. And the film director, Phil Adams.’
‘Phil Adams?’ Richard had seen a few Phil Adams films before now and hadn’t liked any of them.
‘That’s right, sir. Polly also employs a husband and wife team who live in a cottage in the grounds and look after the house when she’s not here. Name of Juliette and Alain Moreau. But they were off at church this morning and have yet to return.’
‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘So what have we been able to discover about the body?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘with a death from a height like this, it’s hard to know what injuries were pre- or post-mortem until we get the results back from the autopsy. However, there is something we noticed.’ Fidel got down on his knees and carefully turned Polly’s right arm so that Richard and Camille could see the inside of her forearm.
There was a deep gash running five or six inches along the inside of her forearm—from just below her elbow to just above her wrist. But what got Richard’s attention was the dirty tinge of green that seemed to smear around the edges of the cut.
‘What’s this?’ Richard asked, indicating the green tinge to the wound.
‘She’s got green marks on her hands, as well, Chief,’ Dwayne said.
Fidel opened the fingers on the victim’s right hand and Richard could see similar green smudgy marks on her palm and fingers.
‘Looks like she tried to grab hold of a bush or something on the way down,’ Camille said.
Richard opened the victim’s left hand and saw the same mossy markings on her left hand as well. Maybe Camille was right. The green marks on the victim’s two hands and inside forearm—and the deep cut down her right forearm—were consistent with the victim having tried to grab hold of something woody before she fell.
Richard looked back up the cliff and didn’t immediately see any kind of bush directly above the body that the victim could have clung to on the way down. However, with a cut as deep as that, Richard knew it would be easy to identify whatever it was she’d clung to. It would almost certainly have a good smear of the victim’s blood on it.
‘Fidel,’ Richard said, ‘I want you to work out what on the cliff face the victim grabbed onto before she fell.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Fidel said, seemingly unbothered by the fact that his boss had effectively just asked him to search a vertical cliff face.
For his part, Richard strode off to the base of the cliff, now interested in the horizontal distance the body had fallen on its way down.
Camille stood up from the body as well. ‘So, what are you thinking?’
‘That suicides don’t leap,’ Richard said, but Camille already guessed where her boss was going with this as Richard started to put one foot in front of the other to measure the distance the body had fallen from the cliff. It was a well-known fact that jump suicides tended to drop from whatever height they’d chosen to commit suicide from. They didn’t leap out to their death. Although, Camille found herself thinking, if the victim had announced her suicide in a heated argument, maybe she’d run for the cliff edge and then jumped.
‘Seventeen feet,’ Richard announced as he reached the body, which gave him pause.
‘Much further than you’d expect,’ Camille agreed.
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t suicide?’
‘Indeed,’ Richard said, once again checking his wristwatch. It was still long before his mother was due to arrive on the island. There was every chance he’d be able to finish up here and still have time to meet her at the airport.
‘Fidel, keep working the scene and supervise the removal of the body with the paramedics. Dwayne, I want you to search the victim’s house. See if you can find any kind of suicide note. As for you and me, Camille, I think we need to talk to the witnesses, don’t you?’
A few minutes later, Richard and Camille were in the sitting room of Polly’s house and Richard was trying hard not to cough, because if the rest of the house was dusty, this room seemed to be where all the dust in the rest of the world came to when it wanted to die. The curtains, old sofas, stacks of books and piles of nick-nacks were all covered in a worn-in grime of ancient dirt, and Richard had noticed that when he shut the door, dust had fallen in a great cloud from the filthy crystal chandelier that hung in the centre of the ceiling and which was missing a good third of its pendants.
As Camille made the introductions and explained to the four assembled witnesses that the police had a duty to investigate all suspicious deaths on the island, Richard took the opportunity to give them all a once-over.
He could see that the victim’s sister, Claire Carter, was sitting in her metal-framed wheelchair wearing beige cotton trousers, simple slip-on shoes, and a light blue cotton top. She had a similar slender build to her sister, similar high cheekbones, but Richard could see that they had very different hair styles. While Polly’s hair was dark, long and unruly, Claire’s was similarly dark, but it was cut into a tight and tidy bob that fell just below her ears. As for her demeanour, Richard could see that Claire had turned entirely in on herself, her shoulders hunched in grief, her head bowed as tears rolled down her cheeks that she dashed away with the back of her hands. It was a sight that Richard felt he’d had to see too often in his career. The grief of the family member who was left behind.
As for Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel, she was a plump woman who Richard guessed was in her mid-to-late forties. She had a friendly face, wide, trusting eyes, and dark hair streaked with plenty of grey that was tied behind her head in a loose ponytail. She was wearing a long dark green dress, simple leather shoes, and she even had a watch pinned upside down on her dress just below her left shoulder. Richard could see that Sophie was holding one of Claire’s hands while also not seeming to be that engaged with the situation, either. As a person who was paid to care for others, Richard felt he recognised the type. Sophie was caring and uncaring both at the same time. Like ‘Matey’—the matron of Richard’s boarding house at school—he thought to himself. Kind when she had to be, but only because it was her professional duty.
Then there was Max Brandon, Polly’s agent. Richard could see that he was a thin man in his fifties who had an angular face under neatly parted jet-black hair—and he hid his eyes behind yellow-lensed sunglasses. A ratty looking man, Richard thought to himself. But what Richard found most interesting about Max was the way he was using the forefinger on his right hand to pick at the skin around the nail of his thumb. In fact, Richard could see that the skin around both of Max’s thumbnails had been picked raw and Richard found himself wondering what it was that was making Max so tense?
As for Phil Adams, Richard guessed that he was also, like Max, in his fifties, but that’s where all similarities ended. Phil was tall, broad-shouldered, and he looked entirely at ease. His hair was blond and glossy—swept back from his handsome face—and his eyes were crinkled with laughter lines. He wore a collarless white cotton shirt that Richard guessed came from a Jermyn Street tailor, knee-length khaki shorts—that Richard noted, with irritation, Phil was able to make look good—and an old pair of flip-flops.
Once Camille had finished the introductions, Richard said, ‘Thank you all for waiting for us. Detective Sergeant Bordey will be taking your formal statements shortly, but first I just wanted to get a sense of what happened this morning. For example, I understand that you, Claire, were with your twin sister when she died. Is that right?’
Claire looked up at Richard, her eyes red-rimmed with grief.
‘That’s right,’ she eventually said, still disbelieving the words she was having to say.
‘Then perhaps you could take us through what happened?’ Camille asked gently.
Claire thought for a moment and then slowly nodded.
‘Of course. Well … I’d gone to the kitchen for breakfast this morning and Polly was already there.’
‘What time was that?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t know. Just before ten, I suppose.’
‘Thank you. And was that the first you saw of your sister today?’
‘It was.’
‘And how would you describe her mood when you saw her?’
‘I don’t know. She was her usual self. Somewhat snappy. Slightly irritating. But nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘You didn’t get on with her?’
‘Not always. Although I think it’s fairer to say that it was Polly who didn’t get on with me.’
‘And why was that?’
‘We didn’t have much in common,’ Claire said sadly. ‘Anyway, she said she wanted to take me for a walk in the gardens, so that’s what we did.’
‘And did you and your sister often go for walks together?’
Claire hesitated a moment before answering. ‘Not really.’
‘Had your sister in fact gone for a walk with you before?’
‘Actually, no. We’d been out together of course, but only as part of a group. And always with Sophie in attendance.’
‘Is that right?’ Richard turned to ask Sophie.
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘Agency rules say I should be available to assist my client at all times, but Polly insisted that she go out with Claire this morning on her own.’
Richard and Camille exchanged a glance.
‘In fact,’ Claire said, equally puzzled, ‘Polly was insistent she didn’t want Sophie to come with us.’
‘And do you know why she wanted it to be just you and her on this walk?’ Richard asked Claire.
‘I have no idea,’ Claire said, ‘but almost as soon as we got out into the garden, Polly started shouting at me. I’ve no idea where it came from. She just seemed to explode. Telling me how unhappy she was, and how her unhappiness was all my fault. I was shocked. I had no idea what she was talking about.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No. You see, we weren’t that close. In fact, I haven’t even seen Polly since last year.’
‘I see.’
Camille turned to Sophie. ‘So, if you were around at the time, did you witness this argument, Sophie?’ she asked.
Sophie nodded. ‘I did. I was about to go upstairs when I heard raised voices coming from the garden. It was Polly shouting at Claire.’
‘Did you hear what was being said?’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t. They were too far away. And when I went into the garden to see if I could help—or intervene—that’s when Polly started pushing Claire towards the cliffs.’
‘That’s right,’ Claire agreed. ‘I saw Sophie come out of the house, and that’s when Polly said something like “you’re coming with me”—and she grabbed my chair and started pushing me really fast towards the cliff. And I can tell you, I was frightened. I was shouting at her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘And I followed a bit,’ Sophie said. ‘You see, I still couldn’t work out if I should intervene or not. And when I lost sight of Claire and Polly, I stopped altogether.’
‘Why did you lose sight of them both?’ Richard asked.
Sophie seemed surprised by the question.
‘Well, there’s a large bed of shrubs across that end of the garden. The steps down the cliff are just beyond it.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, looking at the room, and once again he noticed how Max was looking down at his hands and picking at the skin around his nails.
Phil cleared his throat to announce that he had a contribution to make.
‘I can second all that Sophie and Claire are saying,’ he said, entirely comfortable as he took the floor. ‘You see, I was upstairs in my bedroom at the time. Working on my latest screenplay. And I heard a ruckus coming from the garden, so I went to the window and saw Polly shouting at Claire in the garden. And then, when Polly pushed Claire off to the bottom of the garden and disappeared behind the bushes there, I saw Sophie follow a little way and then stop in the middle of the lawn.’
‘That’s right,’ Sophie said, remembering. ‘I didn’t know if anyone else was around to help, so I looked back at the house and I saw someone standing at one of the upstairs windows.’
‘Well that’s easy to explain,’ Phil said with a tolerant smile. ‘That was me.’
‘What’s that, Phil?’ Max asked, speaking for the first time.
‘It’s not hard to understand,’ Phil said in a condescending manner. Richard could tell that there was little love lost between Phil and Max.
‘I was looking out of my bedroom window,’ Phil continued, ‘so if Sophie saw someone at an upstairs window, it must have been me.’
‘But hang on,’ Max said, licking his lips before he carried on. ‘That would have been me she saw, because I was at the upstairs landing window and looking down on Sophie when Polly died.’
‘You were?’ Camille asked.
‘That’s right,’ Max said. ‘I’d just seen Sophie in the downstairs hallway.’ Here, Max turned to address Sophie. ‘And I’m sorry I didn’t say hello back to you when you wished me good morning.’ Max knew that this was an inadequate thing to say, but he turned back to address Camille. ‘But Sophie can confirm that she saw me inside the house just before Polly died.’
Richard was intrigued. Why was Max trying to establish an alibi for the time of death?
‘Is that right?’ Camille asked Sophie.
‘Yes,’ Sophie said, not entirely sure where Max was going with his story. ‘I definitely saw Max head upstairs just before I went out into the garden. And I said hello to him, but he didn’t say hello back.’
‘But the point is,’ Max said, picking up the story, ‘I was looking out of the upstairs landing window at the time of death. I saw Sophie in the middle of the garden. She was looking straight back at me.’
Richard could see that Sophie was frowning.
‘Tell me, Sophie, was it Max you saw at the upstairs window? Or was it Phil?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The sun was shining on the windows. And I can’t remember precisely which upstairs window I was looking at. But I know I only saw one person.’
‘Who must have been me,’ Max said insistently.
‘Rubbish,’ Phil said. ‘It was me Sophie could see.’
Sophie looked in confusion at Richard, hoping for a steer.
‘Either way,’ Richard said, not wanting his witnesses to get bogged down, ‘tell me, Sophie, once you’d looked back at the house and seen someone at the upstairs window, what happened next?’
‘Well, that’s when I heard a scream,’ Sophie said. ‘An awful scream. And then, a few moments later, I heard Claire shout for help.’
‘And did you see any of this?’ Camille asked.
‘Well, no. It was all behind the bed of shrubs. But I heard it.’
‘And did you, Phil, see what was going on at the cliff top?’
‘I didn’t,’ Phil said. ‘Because it’s like Sophie’s saying. You can see the lawn from the house, but you can’t see the cliff top. There’s a bed of shrubs and bushes in the way.’
‘And I couldn’t see anything, either,’ Max said, reminding everyone that he’d also been at an upstairs window at the time.
‘But it doesn’t matter who else saw what,’ Claire said, and Richard could see from the look in her eyes that she’d just worked out that she was the only person who’d witnessed the death—and therefore the police were treating her testimony with suspicion. ‘Because the thing is, I saw what Polly did once we were both at the cliff.’
‘Yes,’ Camille said, kindly. ‘Then could you tell us in your own words what that was?’
Claire blinked back tears before continuing her story.
‘Well, it was like she was possessed just before she jumped. I mean, she was angry with me when we first went into the garden, but by the time we got to the cliff top, she was going crazy. Saying how selfish I was. How I’d let her down. How I’d never understood the pain she was in. That sort of thing. And then she said she was going to kill herself—it was all my fault—and there was nothing I could do to stop her!’
Claire choked back a sob as she finished speaking.
‘Then what happened?’ Camille asked.
‘Well, she … she ran down the steps a little way, and then, once she was around the corner, she screamed as she jumped.’
‘What’s that?’ Richard asked.
‘I’m sorry?’ Claire said, looking at Richard, confused.
‘You said that once Polly was around the corner, it was only then that she screamed and jumped.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So she didn’t jump from the very top of the cliff?’
‘No. She went down the first flight of steps, and it was only when she’d turned around the corner that I heard her scream as she jumped.’
‘So you didn’t actually see the moment it happened?’
Claire seemed surprised by the question.
‘Well, no. I suppose not. If you put it like that. But then, I couldn’t follow her down the steps in my wheelchair, could I? So, no, I didn’t see the exact moment my sister jumped to her death. Thank God for small mercies.’
Richard wrote this fact into his notebook and very carefully underlined it three times.
Richard next turned to Sophie. ‘And you didn’t see what happened, either, did you?’
‘I’m sorry. No.’
‘Which is interesting. Because it means we’ve only got one witness to what happened. You, Claire. And even you didn’t see exactly what happened.’
Claire was quietly affronted. ‘But I didn’t need to see it. My sister said she was going to end her life. She then ran down the steps and I heard her scream as she fell. I didn’t need to see it to know what happened.’
Richard turned from Claire to Sophie.
‘So tell me, Sophie, how soon after you heard Polly’s scream did you arrive at the cliff?’
‘Oh, not long,’ Sophie said. ‘Thirty seconds? Something like that?’
At this, Claire turned her wheelchair around so she was looking directly at Richard, and he saw a look in her eyes he couldn’t quite place. Was it defiance? Or even desperation? Why did she look so on edge so suddenly?
‘But since you’re so interested in what I saw,’ Claire said, ‘you should know that there was someone else on the cliff steps just before Polly went down them.’
This got everyone’s attention.
‘There was?’ Camille asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you didn’t think to mention this before now?’ Richard asked.
‘You didn’t ask,’ Claire said.
‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘So who was this person you saw beforehand?’
‘Well, I think it was a man.’
‘You think it was a man?’
‘It might have been a woman. You see, I only caught a glimpse of the person as Polly was pushing me towards the cliff. But as we got to the top of the steps, I saw this flash of yellow as whoever it was went down the steps and disappeared around the first bend.’
‘A flash of yellow?’ Richard asked.
‘That’s right,’ Claire said, finally warming to her theme. ‘Because, whoever it was was wearing a bright yellow raincoat. You know, like a plastic cagoule. And the thing is, they had the hood up over their head so I couldn’t see their face.’
‘So you’re saying that this person—whether it was a man or woman—was wearing a plastic yellow raincoat with the hood up, and was on the cliff steps just before your sister jumped to her death?’
‘That’s right.’
Richard knew what he had to do next.
‘Would anyone here mind if Detective Sergeant Bordey now did a search of all your rooms to look for a yellow raincoat?’ Before anyone could answer, Richard continued, ‘Good. Camille, if you would?’
With a nod to her boss, Camille left the room, but Richard only had eyes for the four witnesses. Did any of them look particularly worried at the prospect of their rooms being searched? He had to admit that they didn’t, so Richard turned back to Claire.
‘You see, it strikes me as odd that someone would be wearing a raincoat with the hood up on a boiling hot day when there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.’
‘Yes, when you put it like that,’ Claire said. ‘It does seem strange. But it’s what I saw.’
‘Then can I ask, if there was a person in a yellow coat on the cliff steps before your sister went down them, who was the next person to go down the steps after Polly?’
‘That was me,’ Sophie said.
‘And how soon afterwards did you follow her?’
‘I don’t know, but it could only have been a minute or two later. When I got to the cliff, Claire was upset, and it was only when we saw the body on the beach that I realised what might have happened.’
‘So you’d already seen Polly’s body on the beach before you went down the cliff?’
‘That’s right. Claire had gone a little way along the cliff’s edge. We were both able to look back at the beach from there.’
‘Then did you see a person in a yellow raincoat anywhere on the beach when you looked down at Polly’s body from the top of the cliff?’
Sophie thought for a moment before answering, ‘I’m sorry, no.’
‘Then perhaps you saw this person in the yellow coat on your way down to the beach?’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t see anyone else on the steps. Or on the beach below. In a yellow raincoat or otherwise. When I got down there, there was just Polly’s body. There wasn’t anyone else.’
‘But that’s not possible,’ Claire said. ‘Because I’m telling you I saw a person in a yellow raincoat go down the steps just beforehand, you must have seen them, Sophie! Did you not see a flash of yellow at all? Maybe only after you got down to the beach?’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Richard said. ‘Even by the time my officers arrived at the scene, the only footprints we could find in the sand led from the steps to the body and nowhere else. So, if there was a “Man in Yellow” who went down the steps beforehand, he didn’t go off and hide anywhere else on the beach.’
‘Then perhaps they managed to hide on the steps themselves, Sophie,’ Claire said.
Richard could see that Sophie was briefly conflicted. But only briefly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Claire. ‘I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anyone hiding on the cliff steps, either. And definitely no one in a yellow coat.’
‘But they must have been,’ Claire said with shrill insistence. ‘I know what I saw!’
Richard made a note that whoever Claire saw on the cliff steps before Polly’s death—assuming, of course, she saw anyone—had somehow managed to vanish into thin air afterwards.
‘Very well,’ Richard said. ‘Then can you tell me, Claire, did Polly have a cut in her forearm at all before she went down the cliff steps?’
The question threw Claire. ‘A cut?’
‘That’s right. A deep cut about six inches long, running from the inside of her elbow down to just above her wrist,’ Richard clarified, indicating on the sleeve of his right arm. ‘It would have been bleeding quite heavily.’
‘No,’ Claire said. ‘She wasn’t bleeding at all. And her dress was sleeveless, I’m sure I’d have seen if she’d cut herself in any way.’
‘Then what about you, Sophie?’ Richard asked, turning to the nurse. ‘You must have seen the cut on Polly’s forearm when you found her on the beach?’
Sophie thought for a moment before answering. ‘No … I’m sorry. I didn’t notice any cut on her arm, either.’
Richard made a note. So there was no independent corroboration that the cut on Polly’s arm had been inflicted before she fell. So when exactly had she cut herself? It couldn’t have been post-mortem, could it?
Richard looked back at Sophie. ‘Okay, so once you’d gone to Polly on the beach, what did you do next?’
‘I established that there was no pulse in Polly’s neck and then I called back up to Claire to phone for an ambulance.’
‘That’s right,’ Claire said, ‘but I didn’t have my mobile phone on me, so I had to go back to the house.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Richard said, surprised.
‘I … I didn’t have my mobile on me, so I pushed myself back to the house and used the landline to call for an ambulance. That’s when I saw Max coming down from upstairs and I told him what had happened.’
‘That’s right,’ Max agreed eagerly. ‘I saw Claire heading back across the garden, so I went down to meet her in the hallway. After she’d explained to me what had happened and was phoning for an ambulance, I went down to the beach and waited with Sophie until the ambulance arrived.’
‘Then how about you, Phil?’ Richard asked. ‘When did you discover that Polly had died?’
‘Well that’s the thing,’ Phil said. ‘After I saw the argument in the garden, I went back to my work. I didn’t want whatever was going on between Claire and Polly to distract me. And I carried on working in my room until I saw an ambulance arrive at the front of the house about half an hour later. That’s when I came downstairs and finally heard the terrible news.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, realising that, putting aside which of the two men Sophie saw at the window when she looked back at the house, Max now had a definite alibi for just before the time of death—when he was seen going up the stairs by Sophie—and just afterwards as well—when he was seen coming down the stairs by Claire. As for Phil, seeing as Sophie’s view of the person at the window just beforehand had been so vague, he didn’t seem to have a definite alibi for before the time of death, or for the minutes immediately afterwards.
‘But I don’t understand why you’re asking where we all were,’ Max said nervously. ‘Or wondering who this man in the yellow coat was. None of it’s relevant, because we know what happened. Polly said she’d end her life, she went down the steps and then she threw herself to her death.’
‘Indeed,’ Richard said. ‘And you raise an important point, so can I ask, how surprised are you all that Polly would end her life like this?’
Richard could see the witnesses exchange glances. He’d struck a nerve.
‘If someone could answer the question,’ Richard asked again.
‘Well maybe I should take this,’ Max said. ‘As her agent. Because, if we’re being honest, Polly’s been depressed for some time. So one minute she was up, up, up, and the next, everything had crashed around her and she’d get destructive. She’d want to hurt you until she felt better.’
‘That’s what I meant when I said it was more that she didn’t get on with me,’ Claire said. ‘She was difficult and wilful at the best of times.’
‘But she didn’t do herself any favours, either,’ Max said. ‘Because you should know, Polly was also a recovering drug addict, and that caused terrible mood swings as well.’
‘And when you say drugs?’ Richard asked.
‘Heroin,’ Claire said. ‘She’d been using for years.’
‘Your sister was a heroin addict?’
‘But she checked herself into rehab earlier this year,’ Phil said loyally. ‘She’s been clean since then.’
‘And when was she in rehab?’
‘It was six months ago,’ Max said. ‘Just after Christmas. She spent three months in a clinic in Los Angeles. And since she came out, she’s been clean. I’m sure we’d have known if she wasn’t.’
Max looked around the room, and no one disagreed with him.
‘The point is,’ Phil said, speaking for all of them, ‘we can all imagine that if Polly wanted to end her life, this is the sort of crazy mad-arse way she might go about doing it. She always loved melodrama.’
Richard looked at the witnesses and realised he’d probably got enough from them for the moment. Although there was one loose end he needed to tie up before he could leave.
‘Then thank you all for your time,’ he said to the room, closing down the topic of Polly’s drug addiction for the moment. ‘But one last question. If you don’t mind? Claire, are you really saying you didn’t have your mobile on you when your sister died?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Claire said.
‘Only, in my experience, people who have issues with mobility always have their mobile phones on them. Or some other form of emergency communication or panic button.’
‘Well … that’s true,’ she conceded. ‘I do normally have my mobile with me. I keep it in here.’
Claire indicated a fabric pouch that hung from the armrest of her wheelchair.
‘But your phone wasn’t in your pouch this morning?’
‘I thought it was,’ Claire said, increasingly confused that Richard was following this line of questioning. ‘But when I looked for it on the cliff top, it wasn’t there. It’s why I had to go back to the house to phone for an ambulance. Like I said.’
‘Can you tell me, where is your mobile phone right now?’
‘Really?’
‘If you could just answer the question?’
Claire huffed. ‘Well, as it happens, I’ve not been able to find my mobile since then. To be honest, it’s not been a top priority.’
‘You’re saying it’s still missing?’ Richard asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice.
‘That’s right. I can’t find it.’
‘Then could someone phone Claire’s phone at once,’ Richard asked the room urgently. ‘Then, if we can hear it ringing in the house, I want to locate exactly where it is.’
No one could quite see why this was important to Richard, but Phil pulled his smartphone from his pocket with a sigh.
‘Very well,’ he said sceptically, as he scrolled through his list of contacts. ‘I’ll ring it.’ After pressing the screen, he waited a few seconds, and he then said, ‘Right, then. It’s connecting.’
After a moment, everyone could hear a phone ringing.
It was somewhere in the room.
And then, they all realised where the noise was coming from and looked up at the ceiling.
The chandelier in the middle of the ceiling was ringing.
Claire’s phone was hidden in the chandelier above their heads.
What the hell was it doing there?
Chapter 2 (#ulink_233bfc52-0ec5-5cd6-b683-8d96370c0b0c)
It took a few minutes to liberate Claire’s mobile from the chandelier. In the end, it involved Richard scraping a coffee table over to the middle of the room so that he could stand on it and fish into the chandelier with one hand, his other hand clamping his hankie over his nose against the clouds of dust he was creating in the process.
Once he had Claire’s phone in his hand, Richard asked the assembled witnesses if they knew how it had got into the chandelier, but they were just as flummoxed as he was. It didn’t even begin to make sense.
As Richard put the phone into an evidence bag for processing back at the station, he saw an old Citroën estate car pull up in the driveway with a crunch of wheels on gravel. He then saw a man and a woman get out.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked the room.
‘That’s Juliette and Alain,’ Phil replied. ‘Polly’s staff. I think they’ve been at church.’
Going to the windows, Richard could see that Alain was perhaps in his forties, was of average height, and had short-cropped hair. He was wearing khaki trousers, smart black shoes, a long-sleeved white shirt—and, as he carefully closed the door to his car, Richard got the impression that he was a man who liked everything to be precise and neat. As for Juliette, Richard could see that she was of a similar age to her husband, had a cascade of dark hair that was constrained by a pink bandana, and she was wearing figure-hugging grey Lycra running clothes with bright lime green flashes down the side. It was pretty clear that if Alain had just returned from church, Juliette had been out doing exercise of some sort.
Richard told the witnesses that Camille would take their formal statements in due course, but first he had to break the sad news of Polly’s death to Mr and Mrs Moreau. If they hadn’t already heard.
Once in the hallway, Richard bumped into Camille as she was coming down the main staircase. She told her boss she hadn’t been able to find a yellow plastic coat in any of the bedrooms upstairs, or anywhere else obvious she’d been able to look. What was more, she hadn’t found anything else of note, either. Although they’d have to do a proper search of the house later on.
‘But you should see Polly’s bedroom,’ she said.
‘Why?’ Richard asked, puzzled.
‘Because it’s nothing like the rest of the house. It’s tidy and clean.’
‘It is?’
‘You should take a look at it. You’ll like it,’ she said, with a twinkle.
‘Unfortunately, we’ve got a more pressing job on our hands,’ Richard said, and he explained how Juliette and Alain had just returned.
When Richard and Camille stepped out of the house into the blinding Caribbean sunlight, they could see that Juliette and Alain hadn’t gone into their cottage yet and were instead looking at the police jeep that was parked in the driveway.
‘I’ll take this,’ Richard announced, before striding off.
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ Camille said, knowing that her boss wasn’t exactly the most sensitive when it came to breaking bad news.
But it was too late. Richard had called out ‘One moment, if you please!’ in his most hail-fellow-well-met voice and was already approaching the witnesses.
Camille caught up with Richard after he’d already made the introductions.
‘But what are the police doing here?’ Juliette asked bluntly, her hand on her hip.
Richard could see that Juliette was the sort of woman who was used to getting her own way. As for Alain, Richard was unsurprised to see only meek obedience in the man’s eyes.
‘Just before I answer that,’ Richard said, ‘can I ask where you both were this morning at about 10am?’
‘Why on earth do you need to know?’ Juliette said.
‘If you could just answer the question,’ Richard said in his ‘police’ voice, and Camille’s heart sank because, while it was always useful to get someone’s alibi before they knew why they needed one, it was hardly the kindest way of breaking the news that a friend had just died.
‘Well,’ Alain said, stepping into the conversation bravely. ‘At ten this morning, I was at church.’
‘And you, Mrs Moreau?’ Richard asked. ‘Were you also at church?’
‘Dressed like this?’ Juliette said dismissively, indicating her exercise clothes. ‘No, I was in the middle of my run then. I’m training for a triathlon,’ she said proudly. ‘I then met up with Alain after the church service finished at about 10.30 and we went for a coffee together at a place called Catherine’s bar. I’m sure you know it.’
Richard did indeed know it. It was run by Camille’s mother—and his sometime nemesis—Catherine Bordey.
‘But why do you want to know where we were?’ Alain asked, his forehead furrowed with concern.
‘Forgive us for not saying sooner,’ Camille said. ‘But I’m sorry to say that Polly Carter died at about ten o’clock this morning.’
Neither Juliette nor Alain spoke for a moment.
‘What?’ Juliette eventually asked.
‘I’m sorry. She fell from the cliff at the end of the garden. Her death would have been instantaneous.’
Alain’s legs briefly went, and he put his hand out to steady himself against the car.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still unable to process what he’d just been told. ‘She’s …?’
Richard and Camille steered Alain and Juliette into their cottage so they could recover from the shock in private. It also allowed Richard to check out the Moreaus’ home.
He was pleased to see that Juliette and Alain clearly lived neat and ordered lives. The furniture in the room was simple, the floor was tiled and the walls were white-painted. Little shelves with books on them were arranged by height, a piano sat in the corner with hymn books on—and there were a clutch of colourful pictures of saints on the walls. There were also white cotton curtains that covered French windows looking out over a little yard that contained a washing line, pot plants in a row, and a couple of chairs for sitting out in the sunshine.
It was a modest home, but it was comfortable, Richard decided. Perhaps like its owners.
‘I don’t understand,’ Alain said, still uncomprehending. Polly’s death had hit him hard. ‘You’re saying she jumped?’
‘It’s what it looks like,’ Richard said, not wanting to explain that he still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced that Polly’s death had been suicide. After all, her body had been found too far from the cliff for a normal suicide. And there were plenty of aspects to the witnesses’ statements that suggested there was more to Polly’s death than first met the eye—not least the fact that the only witness to her death only heard the sound of her commit suicide, rather than saw it.
‘Does that surprise you?’ Camille asked.
‘Yes. She had everything to live for. Why would she want to kill herself?’
‘Well,’ Richard said, ‘I understand Polly could suffer from mood swings.’
‘You’re damned right about her mood swings,’ Juliette said. ‘She’d be happy one minute and snappy as hell the next. Isn’t that right, Alain?’
Juliette looked at her husband for confirmation, but Richard could see that Alain was a lot less comfortable speaking ill of the dead than his wife.
‘She could also be capable of great kindness,’ he said, wanting to defend his former boss. ‘Like the way she always brought gifts back for us whenever she went abroad. Or still paid you your salary even when you broke your foot the year before last. That was kind of her.’
‘It was the least she could do,’ Juliette said, more for her husband’s benefit than for the police. ‘And all those drugs she took didn’t help with her moods, I can tell you that much.’
‘So you knew about her drugs?’
‘It was impossible not to.’
‘But she’d stopped,’ Alain said, still trying hard to remain loyal. ‘All that was in the past.’
‘And how would you know?’ Camille asked politely.
Alain frowned. ‘Because she never hid her drugs from us. You’d be cleaning the pool, or tidying away after breakfast and she’d just get out her … you know, all that terrible paraphernalia in front of you. The foil, the filthy spoon, the whole thing, it was disgusting.’
‘She’d inject herself in front of you?’
‘She never injected. As far as I know. She used to smoke her heroin. She called it “chasing the dragon”. But that’s the thing. I’d not seen her do any drugs since she got back from rehab a few months ago.’
‘Yes, we understand she was in rehab in the States. Was that right?’
‘That’s right,’ Alain agreed. ‘And when she got back, I’m pretty sure she’d kicked the habit.’
Juliette snorted, and Richard looked at her.
‘A leopard doesn’t change its spots,’ she said. ‘And if we didn’t see Polly taking her heroin, that just means she’d found somewhere secret to do it, if you ask me.’
Richard looked at Juliette and couldn’t work out if he was grateful for her lack of sympathy for the deceased, or if he should consider it deeply suspicious.
‘Then can you help with something else?’ Richard asked. ‘Only, it’s possible that there was someone already on the cliff steps before Polly died. Someone who was wearing a yellow raincoat.’
‘There was?’ Juliette asked, sharply.
‘Apparently so,’ Richard said, trying to keep the interest out of his voice. It was clear that what he’d said had chimed with Juliette.
‘What sort of yellow coat?’ Juliette asked.
‘A bright yellow raincoat.’
‘With a hood?’
‘Do you know someone who owns a coat like that?’
‘I don’t. But a few days ago, I saw someone down at the bottom of the garden—you know, over by the cliff’s edge—wearing a shiny yellow raincoat with a hood, and I couldn’t work out who it was. I just presumed it was someone from the house.’
‘Did you see if this person was a man or a woman?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t know. I was too far away.’
‘Then what about the person’s build? Or hair, even? Think. It could be important. What can you describe of this person?’
Juliette thought for a long time before answering.
‘I’m sorry. Whoever it was, I couldn’t see, but I remembered it because they had their hood up.’
‘This person had the hood up on their raincoat so you couldn’t see their face?’
‘That’s right.’
Richard frowned. This was the second time someone in the house had seen a mystery person wearing a yellow raincoat over by the top of the cliff. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
‘But if you had to guess, who in the house could it have been?’ Richard asked.
‘I’m sorry. It could have been anyone.’
‘Maybe the person wasn’t from the house,’ Alain offered.
‘Is that possible?’
‘It might be. There’s an old smugglers’ path that goes around the headland up here. People sometimes use it as a shortcut to get around the coast even though they’re not supposed to.’
‘There’s a smugglers’ path up here?’ Richard asked, surprised.
‘That’s right,’ Juliette said, taking control of the conversation back from her husband. ‘This used to be a smuggler’s house. Because of its access to the hidden bay. Back in the day, illegal shipments would come in by boat and get unloaded on the beach at the bottom of the cliffs where the British customs officials couldn’t see. You know?’
‘So the general public have access to Polly’s garden?’
‘They aren’t supposed to, but there’s plenty of people who know about the paths. There are old smugglers’ paths all over the island.’
Richard was disappointed. As long as the mythical yellow-coat wearer was one of the people from the house, then proving that person’s identity might have been an achievable aim. But if it could have been anyone on the island who went down the steps wearing a yellow coat just before Polly died …?
‘I see. Then would you mind if we search your house for a yellow coat?’ Richard said and he noticed Juliette’s eyes narrow at once.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she said, and both Richard and Camille could see the intelligence in her eyes as she asked the question.
‘Because it’s possible that Polly interacted with this person in the yellow coat just before she fell to her death. And we’re trying to find the coat.’
‘What?’ Juliette said. ‘Are you saying the guy in the yellow coat pushed Polly to her death?’
‘We’re very specifically not saying that,’ Richard clarified. ‘However, we’re not ruling anything out for the moment, either.’
Juliette looked at the police and Richard wondered if there was a hint of triumph in her voice as she said, ‘Search wherever you like.’
As the cottage was small, it didn’t take Richard and Camille long to discover that there wasn’t any kind of yellow raincoat anywhere—and nothing much else of interest, either. Once Richard and Camille had thanked the Moreaus for their time, they went back outside.
‘So what did you think?’ Richard asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Camille said. ‘He seemed shocked. Decent. But there was something about her, wasn’t there?’
‘She was happy enough to stick the knife into the deceased,’ Richard agreed.
Before Richard could say anything more, the alarm went off on his mobile phone—which he was quick to pull out of his pocket and silence.
‘What’s that?’ Camille asked.
Richard knew that it was a reminder he’d set earlier to tell him his mother would be touching down on Saint-Marie in an hour’s time.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he lied.
‘No, I don’t buy it,’ Camille said. ‘You’ve been checking your watch all day, and I’ve never known you set an alarm before. Something’s up.’
Richard looked at his subordinate and knew that he had no quick answer, so he decided that his best course of action would be to pretend that she hadn’t spoken at all. He started walking away from her.
‘Hey!’ Camille called out after her boss, before setting off to catch up with him.
‘I want to see this old smugglers’ path,’ Richard said, as though he weren’t sidestepping Camille’s question.
‘Okay, if you want to be like that,’ Camille said, ‘but I’ll find out what’s going on. You know I will.’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ Richard lied again. ‘But where’s this path?’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be over by the cliff’s edge, I reckon. If it’s an old smugglers’ path.’
Once they’d passed the border of shrubs and plants that separated the main garden from the cliff top, Camille looked at where the garden stopped and the jungle began.
‘Yes, you can see it there,’ she said, pointing at an old dirt path that was set ten or so feet back from the cliff’s edge—and which started at the edge of the lawn and disappeared into the thick jungle that swept down the headland.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, Richard could see the old path as well.
‘And where do you think the path leads?’ he asked
‘All the old coastal paths around here lead back to Honoré.’
As Camille was saying this, Fidel appeared over by the cliff’s steps.
‘Sir, sir, I think I’ve found it!’
Richard and Camille went over to Fidel, and, as the three police officers descended the steps that were carved into the cliff face, Fidel explained how the paramedics had removed the body, and since then he had been trying to identify the place on the stairs from where Polly had jumped.
‘And I think I’ve found it, sir.’
As Fidel said this, he led around the first bend in the stairs, and, just a few steps further on, he pointed at the edge of the step. Richard could see there was a gap in the stubby thorn bushes that ran along the edge of the steps, and the escarpment of red dirt had given away a bit. Edging as close to the vertiginous drop as he dared, Richard looked over and could see that the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the beach below.
Richard looked about himself and saw that this spot on the stairs was, as Claire had said had been the case, just beyond the first turn in the steps as they led down the cliff face. As such, this was pretty much the first place on the whole staircase where a person would have been invisible to anyone standing at the top of the stairs. Or sitting in a wheelchair.
This troubled Richard. After all, why didn’t Polly just jump to her death from the top of the cliff? Or from the first flight of steps? Why did she wait until she’d gone around the first bend and started down the second flight of steps before she jumped?
Putting the thought to one side, Richard looked again at how the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the sand far below, and decided that Fidel was almost certainly right. This was where Polly had fallen to her death. In which case, what had Polly cut her arm on? Richard couldn’t immediately see any blood on the steps or anything obviously woody that might have imparted the green tinge they found on her hands and around the cut in her arm.
Fidel already had the crime scene kit to hand, so Richard got out a spray bottle of Luminol and the portable ultraviolet lamp. If Polly had already been bleeding when she went over the edge—as seemed likely—then there should be evidence of blood spatter on the red earth where she’d gone over.
Richard sprayed a fine mist of liquid Luminol over the dirt where he thought Polly’s blood might have dropped. He then shone the ultraviolet light over the same ground immediately afterwards. Blotches of blood immediately started to fluoresce a purplish silver under the UV light.
‘Okay, so there are drops of blood here,’ Richard said. ‘Good work, Fidel. This is now a secondary crime scene. Please secure and process it. In particular, I want you to check if there’s any trail of blood spots that leads to here, or whether the blood is in fact confined to this one site.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Richard creaked back to a standing position, pulled his hankie from his jacket pocket and tried to wipe the sweat from his face and back of his neck.
Camille could see that her boss was troubled.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Well, don’t those spots of blood strike you as odd?’
Camille had played this game often enough to know that it was quicker if she just pleaded ignorance. ‘No, sir. Not odd in any way. So why don’t you tell me why they’re odd.’
‘Because,’ Richard said, ‘if this blood came from Polly’s wound in her arm—which seems to be a fair working assumption—then where’s the object that caused the cut?’
Camille thought for a moment. ‘Maybe she cut herself elsewhere and that’s where the object still is.’
‘But you’ve seen the blood spatter. It looks as though it’s localised to this one step here.’ Richard looked about himself, nonplussed. ‘Okay, let’s work this through. I think the moss on her arm means that she was cut by a branch or bit of wood.’
‘That seems reasonable.’
‘And it will have to have been of decent size to cause such a deep wound.’
‘That also seems reasonable.’
‘So where is it?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.’
Richard and Camille started looking for any kind of loose piece of wood in the scrubby bushes that ran up and down the seaward side of the stone staircase. For Richard, this task required nerves of steel, if only because it involved going right up to the edge of the staircase—a vertical drop to almost certain death only inches beyond—and then reaching in to the bush to see if there was any loose branch hidden inside. And it really didn’t help that the bushes were all thorn bushes.
Richard called out a sudden ‘Ow!’ for the hundredth time as he removed his right hand from one of the thorn bushes, and Camille found herself having to suppress a smile. Watching her boss in his woollen suit pull thorns from his hand while halfway up a cliff face in the searing Caribbean heat, she couldn’t help but conclude that he was one of the most extraordinary men she’d ever met. And even though she mostly found him stubborn, arrogant and lacking in any kind of human warmth, there was no denying that, as a policeman, he got results. And for that, Camille could almost forgive him all his other personal failings. Almost forgive him.
‘Aha!’ Richard called out from further down the steps.
‘What is it?’
Camille headed down to join her boss, who she could see was standing at the next bend in the steps as they zig-zagged down the cliff face. Here—where the steps turned down for the next flight—some proper bushes had been allowed to grow up to about shoulder height in the red dirt, and Richard was on his hands and knees lifting the lower branches on a particularly vicious-looking thorn bush.
As Camille arrived, Richard called back to her, ‘Don’t come any closer.’
He then reached into the bush and carefully pulled an object out.
It was an old bit of driftwood about four feet long. And it was covered top to bottom in a green moss from being in the sea for so long.
‘Now, can you tell me what a piece of driftwood is doing hidden in a bush halfway up a cliff?’
Richard turned the branch over in his hands. At one end, there was still a bit of wood sticking out at a sharp angle where another section of branch had snapped off. This snapped-off bit of branch was only an inch or so long, but Richard and Camille could both see that there were dark stains on it—and around that end of the branch as well.
As the UV lamp and bottle of Luminol were soon able to confirm, the dark patches around the stubby bit of broken-off branch were blood. And the smears on the rest of the driftwood were also blood.
If this was Polly’s blood, then Richard realised that someone else must have hidden the branch after she’d fallen to her death.
In fact, Richard realised, the find was even more significant than that. His suspicions about Polly’s death had been right all along.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Polly Carter didn’t jump. She was murdered.’
Chapter 3 (#ulink_9b695e0e-47cd-5441-a81d-d2ae7b1bf722)
Giving the branch to Fidel so he could bag it for processing, Richard explained his theory.
‘Putting aside the question of how a piece of driftwood ended up near the top of a cliff, let’s see what this means. Polly argued with her sister in the garden, all the witnesses agree on that. And Polly then said she was going to commit suicide. Well, we only have her sister Claire’s word for that, but we’ve got no reason to disbelieve her for the moment, so let’s say that that’s what happened. In a wild fury, Polly turned to Claire and said she was going to kill herself.
‘Then, rather than just jump to her death from the top of the cliff, she made sure she came down the first flight of stairs and turned the corner so she was now out of sight of her sister. Which brings us to the cut in her arm.
‘Because we’ve almost certainly found the piece of wood that cut her—I’m sure we can all agree on that. So, if this were suicide, Polly must have found the piece of driftwood lying here. She must then have picked it up, and then, for reasons known only to herself, she must have stabbed that sharp bit of the branch into her skin and ripped a vicious cut down her forearm. Which doesn’t seem likely, does it?’
‘It doesn’t, sir,’ Fidel agreed.
Richard indicated the break in the bushes where Polly had fallen to her death.
‘And we know that Polly was bleeding quite heavily when she went over the edge. There’s blood in the dust here where she fell.’ Richard then pointed a good twenty or thirty steps further down the staircase at the bush where they’d found the bloody piece of driftwood. ‘So how did she manage to get to that bush all that way down there, hide the branch in the bushes, and then get back up here without leaving a single drop of blood on the steps in between? And if that’s impossible—which frankly it is, if you ask me—just why would she self-harm herself with a branch, go down the steps, hide the branch, then come back up to here, and only then jump to her death?’
Fidel and Camille could see the logic of what Richard was saying.
‘Which means we’ve got a problem.’
‘It does, sir?’ Fidel said.
‘Because the scene only makes sense if there was someone already waiting here before Polly came down the steps.’
‘You mean the man in the yellow raincoat?’ Camille asked.
‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ Richard said. ‘But whoever it was, they were not only waiting here, but they also had that branch with them. Ready to knock Polly to her death the moment she came round the corner.’
‘Which is why her body fell so far from the cliff’s edge.’
‘Indeed. A whole seventeen feet. She didn’t jump. She was knocked off the steps with considerable force.’
‘And the thing is, sir,’ Camille said, realising the implications of what Richard was saying, ‘I can see why you’d use an old branch to commit the murder. You’d want to keep your distance so the victim couldn’t grab at you and pull you over the edge when she went over.’
‘Good point,’ Richard said.
‘And you’d also want to ensure that none of your DNA or fibres from your clothes got caught under the victim’s fingernails if she fought back.’
‘Yes. That’s true as well,’ Richard said, unable to stop a hint of irritation from slipping into his voice. This was supposed to be his revelation, not Camille’s.
‘But that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?’ Camille continued. ‘Polly grabbed hold of the branch and cut her arm on it just before she fell.’
‘Yes, very good,’ Richard said, finally interrupting Camille’s flow before she could steal all of his thunder. ‘Because, in any tussle to the death, our killer wouldn’t necessarily have noticed that Polly had cut herself just before she went over the edge. And he or she would then have hidden the piece of driftwood in the bush perhaps without realising that it was now covered in Polly’s blood.’
‘But if the killer didn’t notice the blood on the branch,’ Fidel said, ‘then that suggests that he or she was in a serious rush after the murder.’
‘But that’s not surprising,’ Camille said. ‘The killer must have guessed that someone would have heard the scream as Polly fell to her death. And would come to investigate.’
‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘Which is exactly what happened, isn’t it? Sophie came down these steps only a minute or so later. Which is why we have a problem. Or rather, four problems. Because, firstly, if there was someone already on the steps here—whether it was our man in yellow or someone else—then how on earth did he or she know that Polly would come down these steps at that precise moment? And secondly, what are the chances that Polly would announce that she was going to commit suicide at the precise moment that the killer was planning to commit murder? The whole thing is the most incredible coincidence, don’t you think? And thirdly, and even more impossibly, seeing as we know our killer was on these steps beforehand, how on earth did this man in yellow—or whoever-it-was—then manage to vanish from the cliffs before Sophie got here only a minute or so later?’
Richard looked at Fidel and Camille and knew that they agreed with him. It didn’t seem possible.
‘But, sir, that was only three things,’ Fidel said.
‘I know,’ Richard said, delighted that one of his team had fallen into his trap. ‘Because the last question I’d ask is: why on earth did we find Claire’s phone in a chandelier back at the house?’
There was a moment before either Fidel or Camille responded.
‘You’d ask that as your fourth question, would you, sir?’ Fidel asked tentatively.
‘Of course!’ Camille told him in well-worn exasperation. ‘We’ve got a killer committing murder here, but let’s make sure we work out how a phone got into a light fitting.’
‘Indeed,’ Richard said, entirely delighted. ‘I’m telling you, it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like things that don’t make sense.’
There was a clattering of footsteps from above them and Dwayne appeared around the corner of the stone steps.
‘Oh okay, Chief,’ he said, once he’d regathered his breath. ‘I think this could be murder.’
‘You do?’ Richard said. ‘How gratifying. We’ve just come to the same conclusion. But what have you found?’
Dwayne wanted to show them, so Richard and Camille followed Dwayne back to the house and into a room that Dwayne explained was Polly’s study.
On entering the room, Richard could see that it was identical in shape and size to the sitting room they’d interviewed the witnesses in, with exactly the same floor-to-ceiling windows and curtains overlooking the garden and sea beyond. And with a similarly dusty chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. In fact, the only architectural difference between the two rooms as far as Richard could tell was the fact that one wall of this room had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running down its side that was stuffed with old books, junk and Polly’s mementoes in pretty much any order.
But seeing as it was Polly’s study, there was also an old metal filing cabinet, a desk made from what looked like an old door balanced on trestle tables, a battered old laptop sitting on it among a slew of old bills and unopened post, and various odds and sods of furniture sitting any old way around the room.
‘Okay, so you should know,’ Dwayne told Richard and Camille, ‘I’ve had a good look through the rest of the study, and I can’t find any kind of suicide note anywhere.’
‘Have you looked on her laptop?’ Camille asked.
‘Just quickly,’ Dwayne said. ‘And there’s no emails in her sent folder, or recently written documents at all.’
‘So what makes you think it was murder?’ Richard asked.
Dwayne indicated the battered filing cabinet, and Richard could see that there was a metal clasp attached to the top drawer, with a combination padlock keeping it shut. Or rather, the lock would have been keeping the drawer locked, but somebody had jemmied the whole clasp from the drawer, and now it hung limply.
‘Someone’s broken into her filing cabinet!’ Richard said.
‘Yeah,’ Dwayne said before coughing a couple of times. ‘That was me.’
‘What?’ Richard said, incredulous.
‘Hey,’ Dwayne said defensively. ‘We’ve got a dead body. I wanted to see what was worth keeping behind lock and key.’
‘But that’s criminal damage!’
Camille wanted to get on, so interrupted. ‘What did you find?’
With a grateful smile to Camille, Dwayne opened the top drawer.
‘Well, for starters, this is where Polly once kept her stash of drugs.’
Richard and Camille were both hit by a pungent smell as they looked inside the drawer and saw a tiny set of brass scales, old spoons that had been blackened from heroin use, cigarette papers, smoke-discoloured bongs, a mirrored tile, and crumbs of hash, brown heroin and white powder dusted everywhere. In a flash of recognition, Richard realised that the mess and fetid stink of the drawer reminded him of his Great Uncle Harold’s pipe cupboard, with its various bits of paraphernalia—from pipe cleaners, to penknives, to old broken pipes and boxes of Swan Vestas matches—but then, it occurred to him, both pipe smoking and heroin abuse were essentially the same thing: drug addiction. It’s just that one of the addictions required considerably more wearing of slippers than the other.
Richard also saw a rusty mortice key sitting on top of a pile of old papers. He fished the key out and saw that it was about as long as his forefinger, had three worn teeth, and was obviously quite old.
‘Now this is interesting,’ Richard said. ‘Who keeps a key locked inside a locked drawer?’
‘Someone who wants to keep a key inside a locked drawer,’ Camille offered, a lot less impressed with the find than her boss.
Before Richard sidetracked them with the key, Dwayne pulled out the pile of papers that were at the bottom of the drawer.
‘But this is what makes me think somebody wanted Polly Carter dead, Chief.’
Dwayne took the papers to the desk and laid them out one by one.
They were each A4 in size and there were six of them. And on each of them was a message that had been made from cutting individual letters out of a newspaper headline and then gluing them to the sheet of A4.
The first patchwork message of cut-out newspaper letters read:
The three police officers looked at each other. Dwayne was right. Someone out there had wanted Polly Carter dead. And now she was.
‘Did you find any envelopes with these notes?’ Richard asked, knowing that with anonymous letters, the most useful clue was often the envelope itself, which could sometimes be handwritten, but was almost always dated and franked with a posting location at least.
‘I looked and couldn’t find any,’ Dwayne said.
‘Then are there any other indicators on the letters themselves as to who sent them?’
‘Not to the naked eye. But this is important, isn’t it?’ Dwayne said. ‘Because, if you ask me, someone who’s prepared to create anonymous messages from newspaper headlines is pretty desperate. And desperate people can end up doing desperate things like committing murder.’
‘I agree,’ Richard said.
There was a sharp ringing from Richard’s inside jacket and he realised that someone was calling his mobile phone. He pulled it out from his jacket pocket and looked at the screen. It was his mother. He checked his watch. Of course. She’d have just landed at the airport.
‘One moment,’ Richard said to Camille and Dwayne, and, trying not to look too guilty—which only made him look guilty as hell—Richard moved off to one side to take the call as quietly as possible.
‘Hello,’ he whispered into his mobile.
Richard listened a moment before replying, ‘Yes, okay. I can be at the airport in half an hour. Yes, okay. Of course. Then I’ll take you to your hotel. Good. Right. Well, I’ll see you then, then. Yes, of course. Half an hour. I’ll see you then.’
Richard hung up his phone and returned to the table so he could look at the anonymous letters, hoping he’d got away with it.
‘Okay, now you’re going to have to tell me,’ Camille said.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Who that was on the phone?’
‘That phone call?’
‘Yes, that phone call.’
‘Oh, no one of note,’ Richard said, looking back down at the threatening letters as though the conversation was now closed.
‘All right,’ Camille said, with a deadly smile. ‘But if you don’t tell me what’s going on, then I’m going to reach into your jacket pocket, pull out your phone and find out for myself.’
Richard looked up from the notes in a panic.
‘I’m sorry? You’d reach into my pocket?’
‘Yes.’
‘And pull out my phone?’
‘Yes.’
Camille just kept on looking at her boss. She knew how this would go.
She wasn’t wrong.
‘Oh all right,’ Richard eventually said. ‘If you must know, my mother’s just arrived at Saint-Marie airport.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Dwayne said.
‘My mother’s come to visit me.’
‘Your mother’s on the island?’
‘Yes. What’s so strange about that?’
Camille clapped her hands together in delight. ‘How long is she over for?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘And she’s here now?’
‘She should be.’
‘But you’ve got to tell us, what’s she like?’
Richard frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, your mother! I mean, is she like you at all, sir?’
‘Like me?’ Richard was appalled by the question. ‘Of course not.’
‘Then what’s she like?’
Richard didn’t even know where to begin. After a moment of further reflection, he said, ‘Well, for starters, she’s very neat and precise.’
‘Which isn’t like you at all, sir,’ Dwayne said.
‘And on top of that, she’s a terrible worry-wort.’
Dwayne and Camille frowned.
‘A what?’ Camille asked.
‘You know, she worries about everything.’
‘Which is also unlike you, is it, Chief?’ Dwayne eventually asked as diplomatically as he could.
‘And she’s a fusspot.’
‘She’s a worry-wort and a fusspot?’ Camille asked, unable to keep the laugh out of her voice.
‘Yes. That’s what I said.’
As for Dwayne, he also felt as though he needed further clarification from his boss. ‘Again, sir … so you’re saying these are traits that are unlike you?’
‘Of course they’re unlike me!’ Richard exploded. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I believe everything has a place, and there’s a place for everything—and I definitely believe that there are certain standards you have to keep up—but you have to believe me, I’m nothing compared to my mother.’
‘Wow,’ Dwayne said, summing up both his and Camille’s feelings on the subject.
‘So when do we get to meet her?’ Camille asked.
‘Ah, well that’s the thing,’ Richard said, finally glad to be getting back control of the conversation. ‘While I’m picking her up, I want you, Camille, to get all this evidence logged and into bags. And, Dwayne, I want you to search the house properly from top to bottom. Keep looking for a yellow raincoat, but I also want you to try and find out what this key opens.’ As Richard said this, he went over to the filing cabinet and pulled out the old mortice key. ‘Because it may be connected. But someone killed Polly Carter. I suggest we find out who it was, and why Polly had to die.’
Before either of his subordinates could stop him, Richard made his excuses and drove off in the police jeep, bound for Saint-Marie airport.
Once there—and while he waited for his mother to clear Customs—Richard stood beside a palm tree a little way off from the white-washed building that acted as both the island’s Arrivals and Departures lounge. The building was only small because Saint-Marie didn’t have a runway long enough for international flights, so tourists first had to fly to the neighbouring island of Guadeloupe and then change onto a little propeller plane that the locals called ‘the grasshopper’. Richard had only taken this plane a handful of times, but it was aptly named. By the time it had ascended vertiginously to its cruising height, it immediately fell out of the sky to land on Saint-Marie.
Richard straightened his tie as he waited, and then realised it had come a little loose. But it would be okay, he was sure.
In a sudden loss of sartorial confidence, Richard ducked behind the palm tree, undid the knot of his tie, yanked the whole thing from his neck, flicked the collars up on his sweat-sodden shirt, and made himself tie a better knot at speed. He then flipped the collar of his shirt back down, stepped back out into the sunshine and exhaled in relief. He’d got away with it. His mother still hadn’t emerged.
Richard felt a trickle of hot sweat roll from his cheek, down his neck and into his shirt collar, and suddenly every inch of his skin under his suit seemed to prickle from the blistering heat.
And then there she was.
A slender woman in her late sixties, wearing a pink floral dress and an immaculate straw hat with a hatband in the same pink floral fabric as her dress, Jennifer Poole stepped out into the sunshine, a black suitcase-on-wheels at her side.
Richard took half a step forward and raised his hand in a nearly-but-not-quite wave.
‘Hello, Mother,’ he said.
‘Oh, Richard, what a terrifying journey!’ Jennifer said, as she wheeled her suitcase over to her son. ‘I mean, they call it economy, and they really mean it, don’t they? Before we’d even left London, I was trying to get the dust out of my seat, and do you know what? The woman sitting next to me told me I should just put up with it. Can you imagine? And when I started using my wipes on the fold-down tray in front of me—and on her fold-down tray—she called a flight attendant over and point blank complained. Which made for a frosty silence between her and me for the next eight hours, I can tell you. But by the time we landed at Guadeloupe, she was sneezing, so for all she gave me funny looks whenever I used the antibacterial gel on my hands, I’m not the one who’s going to come down with Legionnaires’ Disease.’
Even Richard was pretty sure that no one caught Legionnaires’ Disease from aeroplane air conditioning systems. But before he could tell his mother this, she was off again.
‘And when we landed in Guadeloupe, I couldn’t believe how hot it was. I mean, I expected the tropics to be hot, but I wasn’t expecting heat like this, and I remember the heatwave of 1976. But I’d decided I’d just have to cope with it when they took us to the plane they told us we were transferring to Saint-Marie on. Well! I could see rust around the rivets on the wings. And you know how your great uncle was in the Fleet Air Arm, and he always said you should never get in a machine that didn’t look as though it was looked after with pride?’
Richard noted the pause, and gave the correct response.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Well, I very nearly didn’t get on it, and then—when I did—I discovered that I was sitting next to a man who had a chicken on his lap in a crate. I mean, it was a very fine-looking chicken, but you don’t expect to see a chicken on a commercial flight, do you?’
Again, Richard gave the correct response. ‘No, Mother.’
‘But I’m here now, I suppose, and it really is wonderful to see you.’
Jennifer stopped talking long enough to look at her son.
‘And I must say, you look very smart.’
Richard couldn’t help but feel a little burst of pride at this compliment.
‘So where’s Dad?’ he asked, and recognised the maternal frown at once.
‘Do I need to go everywhere with him? I am my own person, you know,’ she said.
‘No, of course you are,’ Richard quickly agreed. ‘It’s just, I’ve only really got time to drop you off at your hotel, I’m afraid. There’s been a murder.’
Jennifer looked at her son and sighed.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been putting up with your father’s murders my whole life, I’m sure I can put up with yours.’
As Jennifer said this, Richard saw a pair of passing nuns in wimples look over in shock and then skitter off in a panic.
‘But you should know,’ Jennifer finished, ‘I’m here to have a holiday whether you’re free to be a part of it or not.’
‘No. Of course. What hotel are you staying in, and I’ll take you there,’ Richard said.
On the drive to the hotel, Richard and his mother exchanged pleasantries. He heard about Beth from number seven and the problems she was having with her son-in-law. He then heard the story of Professor Brodowski’s cat. You remember Professor Brodowski? Lives in number eleven? Has the daughter with the lazy eye? It was the typical flotsam and jetsam of life in his mother’s close, and Richard was able to keep up his end of the conversation without having to engage his brain too much. This allowed him to become enveloped by an increasing sense of unease as the journey progressed, if only because in all of his forty-four years, he’d never known his mother spend a single night away from his father. And now she’d booked a whole holiday on her own, and on the other side of the world at that. What was going on?
Once Richard made sure that his mother was comfortable in what had turned out to be a far more top-end hotel than he was expecting, he made his apologies and returned to the police station.
‘So what have you got?’ Richard shot at his team as he strode back into the swelteringly hot station.
Dwayne, he saw, was on the phone, Fidel was dusting Claire’s mobile phone for fingerprints, but Camille was at the whiteboard writing up the details of the case.
‘So how’s your mother?’ she asked him. ‘Safe flight?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Richard said as brusquely as he could. He was not going to be sidelined by familial chit chat. ‘So did you manage to process the anonymous letters we found in the victim’s filing cabinet?’
Camille looked at her boss tolerantly, accepting that he was refusing to play ball.
‘I took digital photographs of the front and back of all six letters for our records, but have sent the originals to the labs on Guadeloupe for analysis. We’ve also bagged and sent over the branch we found at the scene and which was covered in blood. And Fidel has also sent samples of the blood spatter he found in the dirt at the jump point.’
Richard smiled tightly, as ever, deeply frustrated that Saint-Marie was too small an island to have any crime scene labs of its own.
‘Thank you. Then how about you, Fidel? How are you getting on?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, looking up from where he’d been dusting Claire’s mobile phone on his desk. ‘First I tried dusting the key you found in the victim’s filing cabinet, but it’s so rusty and old, it’s not possible to raise a single print.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then could I have it, please?’
Fidel reached over to a small plastic tray where the key was sitting. He picked it up and handed it to Richard. Richard looked at it again, trying to divine its meaning, and then, with a disappointed tut to himself, he slipped the key into his trouser pocket.
‘But since then, I’ve been lifting fingerprints from Claire’s mobile phone that you found in the chandelier, and matching them with the exclusion prints we took from the witnesses.’
‘So whose prints are on the phone?’
‘I’ve only been able to raise twelve clear fingerprints. The rest of the phone is just a smear. And while eight of the fingerprints belong to Claire Carter, the remaining four fingerprints belong to her sister, Polly.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, working through the logic of what this might mean. ‘So, as there’s no way Claire could have put the phone in the chandelier herself—seeing as she’s confined to a wheelchair—that either means that it was put there by Polly, or her fingerprints just happened to be on the phone anyway, and it was put there by someone else who was wearing gloves so they didn’t leave their prints on the phone.’
‘Exactly, sir,’ Fidel said.
Richard considered what Fidel had just told him, and then decided it was time to get on.
‘So, Polly Carter!’ he said, indicating the notes Camille had written up on the whiteboard. ‘A world-famous super-model is at home with her sister, Claire Carter; Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel; her manager, Max Brandon; her friend and film director, Phil Adams. Oh, and her live-in home help Juliette and Alain Moreau are also in the picture, although they say they were both elsewhere at the time of the murder.’
‘Assuming they’re telling the truth,’ Camille pointed out.
‘Indeed. Anyway, we know that Polly was a tricky woman to work for—according to Juliette, her home help. Although she could also be generous, according to her husband, Alain.’
‘And she could be hyper one minute and depressed the next,’ Camille added. ‘According to Max, her agent.’
‘And way too trusting, according to her good friend, Phil.’
‘She just sounds like your typical self-centred celebrity,’ Dwayne summed up for them all.
Richard looked at Dwayne in mock surprise. ‘You know about the world of celebrities, do you, Dwayne?’
‘I know it’s not healthy,’ Dwayne said. ‘And if Polly’s been famous since her early twenties, she’s going to have a pretty warped view of the world, I can tell you that much, Chief.’
‘Very well. So that’s our victim. And this morning, she went for a walk with her sister, Claire.’
‘Even though this was the first time she’d been out for a walk with her sister on her own,’ Camille offered.
‘Quite so,’ Richard agreed. ‘And, according to Claire, once they were in the garden, Polly started losing her temper with her. And then—again, according to Claire—Polly took Claire to the top of the cliffs and threatened to kill herself before then going down some of the steps and throwing herself to her death. However, the wooden branch we later found covered in blood at the scene suggests that that’s not quite what happened. In fact, what the branch suggests is that someone was already waiting on the steps before Polly had arrived.’
‘The man in the yellow raincoat,’ Dwayne offered.
‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘But whoever this person was, they attacked Polly with the branch, knocked her to her death, and then hid the branch before making their escape. Somehow. But the point is, we already know from the anonymous letters that there’s already one person out there who wanted Polly Carter dead, so I want background checks run on Polly Carter and everyone who was up at the house. Who benefits from her murder? Who’d want her dead? I also want us chasing the autopsy on her body. If she was attacked by someone wielding that branch, I bet there’ll be further evidence on her body.’
‘And there are your questions from earlier,’ Fidel offered.
‘Indeed, but I think I’ve got a slightly different set of four questions now,’ Richard said, turning back to the board and writing up a list in his neat handwriting.
Once he’d done so, he stepped away from the board so his team could see what he’d written.
The Key Questions
1. How did the killer know to be on the cliff at that precise moment?
2. How did the killer vanish into thin air afterwards?
3. Why was Claire’s mobile phone found in a chandelier?
4. Who sent the anonymous letters?
‘And you know what?’ Richard said, putting the lid back on his whiteboard marker with a satisfying pop. ‘I think that if we can answer those four questions, we’ll stand a good chance of identifying who killed Polly Carter, knowing just why she had to die, and—above all else—just how the killer escaped afterwards without being seen. Now then, team, let’s get to work.’
Chapter 4 (#ulink_3328cf0d-10dc-56f7-8e79-3eb097b7fbe6)
The following day, Richard was sitting at his desk trying to focus on work, but his mind kept drifting back to the dinner he’d had with his mother the night before. It’s not that she’d been difficult in any way—if anything, she’d wanted only to talk about Richard’s life on the island—but, as an experienced copper, Richard got the impression that his mother was being evasive somehow. There’d been a reserve in her eyes he couldn’t place. And Richard’s disquiet was stirred further by the way his mother seemed to deflect any questions he asked about his father. ‘Oh you know what he’s like,’ she’d just said brightly, without any real meaning to her words at all.
But perhaps most unsettling of all, Richard had discovered that his mother didn’t have any set plans for her visit, and he’d never known her travel anywhere without detailed notes and pre-planned itineraries. Instead, she told him that there was a lovely boy she’d met on reception called Karl who was putting together an itinerary for her, starting with a tour of a local rum distillery the following morning.
In short, the whole evening had been quite peculiar for Richard, and as he’d pecked his mother on each cheek to bid her goodnight, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been ‘played’ somehow.
However, Richard knew he was supposed to be researching Polly’s life before her death—not thinking about his mother—so he made himself look at the news article he’d got up on the computer monitor. And then he realised what the article said.
‘Good grief!’ he said in amazement.
Camille sighed heavily. ‘What is it this time?’
Richard indicated the webpage on his screen. ‘It says here that, back in 2005, Polly attended an orgy in Cheam.’
‘I told you, sir, they’ll print anything,’ Camille said, not even remotely for the first time.
‘But how do they know?’ Richard asked in awe. ‘Do you think a reporter was actually there?’
There was a warm chuckle from behind Dwayne’s monitor. And then his face appeared, his eyes sparkling. ‘You’d be surprised, Chief.’
‘I certainly would be surprised if I found myself at an orgy in Cheam.’
Richard made a note of this latest impossible-to-believe fact on his ever-expanding list of lies, truths, half-truths and PR puff he’d so far been able to uncover about Polly. He’d learnt that she’d at one time been the highest paid model in the world; that she was patron of a hedgehog sanctuary in Cornwall; that she was a well-known heroin addict who’d spent her life battling addiction; that she’d designed a range of clothes for toddlers; that there was still an active warrant for her arrest in Portugal for assaulting a press photographer; that she’d done the Duke of Edinburgh Outward Bound courses as a teenager and had a Gold Medal; and that she’d dated a famous rock star for many years, even though, as far as Richard could tell, the man in question didn’t look so much like a rock star as a bin man.
The only useful facts Richard had so far been able to glean from the internet were that the previous September Polly had suffered a massive drugs overdose and nearly died. She’d been rushed to hospital, had her stomach pumped and had a blood transfusion, and had only just survived. There were photos all over the web that Richard had been able to find of a stick-thin Polly leaving the hospital on Saint-Marie wearing dark shades and using a walking stick twelve days after she was admitted.
But if she’d nearly died from a drugs overdose in September, he’d also discovered that, after Christmas, just as the witnesses had said in the first interviews, she’d checked herself into a rehab clinic just outside Los Angeles and had spent ten weeks there. Richard knew all this because he’d found a press release online that had been issued by Polly’s manager Max back in March when Polly had got out. In his statement, Max said that Polly had finally won her lifelong battle with addiction and was now eager to return to her work as one of the most in-demand models in the world.
Richard realised that his thoughts kept slipping back to what an orgy in Cheam would look like, so, before he got too confused, he jumped out of his chair and clapped his hands together in a way—far too late—he realised, probably made him look like a newly qualified Geography teacher.
‘Right, then, team,’ he said. ‘What have we got so far?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, picking up his notes eager to report to his boss. ‘I’ve been looking into Phil Adams, and he’s from quite an impressive family. Before he retired, his dad was a teacher at Eton College, and his mum is a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office. As for siblings, he’s got an older brother and a younger sister. The brother’s a banker who owns his own hedge fund company—so he’s worth a fair bit—and his sister’s the British Ambassador to Slovenia.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, unable to stop himself from being impressed. Phil came from a super-successful family.
‘As for Mr Adams himself,’ Fidel continued, ‘he made his name with a string of violent gangster films back in the 1990s, but he’s not made much since then. And the main thing I’ve been able to dig up about him is, he was also in rehab in Los Angeles earlier this year.’
‘He was?’ Richard asked, thrown. ‘Was everyone in Polly’s house in rehab?’
‘No, sir, just Phil Adams and Polly Carter as far as I can tell. But I don’t know what clinic he was booked into, or why he was booked into it. It was just a few references in the gossip columns of a couple of UK newspapers. That following the failure of his latest feature film last year, he’d booked himself into rehab.’
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