Death Knocks Twice

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Oh, are those coffee bushes?’ Richard asked.

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Where the coffee berries grow?’

  ‘We call them cherries, but yes, that’s where they grow.’

  ‘I see,’ Richard said, none the wiser. ‘Sorry, why do you call them cherries?’

  ‘Because the fruit of the coffee plant is red like a cherry. Don’t you know how coffee is made?’ Lucy asked, surprised.

  ‘Well, I know it comes in jars,’ Richard said before realising that this was probably the wrong thing to say.

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ Camille said, trying to get the interview back on track. ‘But you were telling us that you felt you were being watched when you were down by these farm buildings?’

  ‘That’s right. And a couple of days ago I thought I’d got proof. I was just getting into my car when I had the feeling again – that someone was spying on me – and when I spun round, I caught this quick flash as whoever it was ducked behind that wall over there.’ Here, Lucy pointed at a stone wall that separated two buildings. ‘I was shocked, I can tell you. But I made myself go over and look behind the wall. If I’m honest, I was really scared. But what I saw was kind of the worst thing possible.’

  ‘Why?’ Camille asked. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Whoever it was had gone. They’d just vanished into thin air. It was really spooky. Because I was sure I’d seen someone, but they were no longer there. And after that moment, I started to doubt my own shadow. It even occurred to me that maybe I’d been seeing things. But then this morning, I finally saw him. The guy who’s been stalking me. Plain as day. Let me show you.’ Lucy led them off to a clump of vegetation that pressed up against the side of one of the old buildings. ‘I was just coming back from the fields when I looked over and saw a man standing to the side of this bush here.’

  ‘And it was definitely a man?’ Richard asked, eagerly pulling his notebook and pencil from his inside pocket.

  ‘Oh yes. This old guy with a beard and straggly grey hair down to his shoulders. He looked like a tramp if I’m honest.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something like 10am. Or just after.’

  ‘What colour was his skin?’

  ‘I think white.’

  ‘Did you recognise him?’

  ‘No. But I only saw him for a split second. Because the moment he realised that I’d seen him, he ran back into the jungle just beyond the bush here. And then I did a pretty stupid thing. I chased after him. Look.’ Lucy went over and indicated a couple of thin branches on the edge of the jungle. They were snapped back, and Richard could see the white sap seeping from the exposed wood inside.

  ‘You followed him into the jungle?’

  ‘I did.’

  Richard could see how anxious Lucy was.

  ‘And did you catch him?’

  ‘No. He had a head start on me, and the jungle’s pretty thick around here, so about ten steps in, I lost him altogether. That’s when I came back out here, got straight into my car and came down to the Police station to report the incident. Because, whoever he is, it’s got to stop.’

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘this man could be anywhere by now?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Well, let’s see about that,’ Camille said, and before Richard could stop her, his partner had pushed through the broken branches and started to wade into the thick jungle.

  ‘Camille, what are you doing?’ Richard asked, unable to keep the panic out of his voice.

  ‘Police work,’ she called back, at which point Richard saw her stop dead in her tracks. Oh God, he thought to himself, what if a giant spider had just jumped at Camille’s face? Fortunately for Richard, before he had to pretend that he was about to come to his partner’s aid, Camille headed off at a new bearing, and he realised that she’d only paused to check that she was on the right track before continuing on her way.

  As the dense vegetation finally swallowed Camille, Lucy turned to Richard.

  ‘We’d better follow her,’ she said, before pushing into the jungle and soon disappearing herself.

  Richard looked about himself in a panic. While he felt just about okay-ish letting one woman go into the jungle on her own – especially seeing as she was a trained Police Officer – he felt he couldn’t very well let two women vanish into the unknown while he stayed back here on the fringes, even though that was precisely where he wanted to stay. So, taking a deep breath to steady his internal shriek of terror, Richard stepped into the jungle.

  Within seconds, he was lost. The vines and vegetation pressed into his face, the fetid smell of the jungle was revolting – it seemed to be a pungent mix of rotting fruit and decaying animals – which, when Richard thought about it, was very possibly because the jungle was full of rotting fruit and decaying animals. He felt whole rivers of sweat run down his back. Where had the women got to? Richard heard some branches snapping up ahead of him, and he made himself push through the sticky vegetation another ten or so paces until he saw the figures of Camille and Lucy through a thick screen of vines. Before he lost his nerve entirely, Richard covered the remaining distance like a mad marionette – his legs and arms lifting as high and wide as possible – until he burst through the wall of vines into a little clearing.

  As Richard dashed the burrs, berries and sticky godknows-whats from his jacket and trouser legs, he could see Camille looking directly at him and smiling broadly. He gritted his teeth. As far as Richard was concerned, it wasn’t his fault he didn’t function well in a tropical jungle, was it? His last posting had been in Croydon, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘You okay, sir?’ Camille asked, pretending to be concerned.

  ‘Yes. I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘Then I think you need to see this. I’ve found something.’

  Richard went over and saw that Camille and Lucy had found an area of ground that was littered with empty water bottles, paper bags that had once contained fresh food, crushed cigarette packets and an empty bottle of cheap vodka.

  ‘Someone’s been here,’ Camille said, indicating the food.

  Richard saw a column of bright red fire ants – each seemingly the size of his thumb – marching up to and engulfing a bag that had once contained a pastry of some sort, and he took a couple of steps back.

  ‘Although I don’t see any evidence of anyone sleeping out here,’ Camille said, looking about herself. ‘No tent’s been pitched. Or bivouac. Or rain cover of any sort.’

  ‘I see,’ Richard said, lifting his feet up one by one to check that an army of fire ants weren’t already marching up his legs. ‘So tell me, Ms Beaumont, is there anything else you noticed about the man you saw earlier today?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve told you everything I can remember. He was definitely a man. And he was definitely old. I didn’t really notice his clothes, but he had this beard – sort of whitish, sort of grey – and long-flowing grey hair. That’s all I saw. And I had no idea that he had any kind of camp in the jungle here.’

  Richard looked about himself. It wasn’t much to go on, was it? An old tramp had been spying on Lucy from the jungle. And when Lucy had tried to confront him, he’d run away.

  There was a sudden bang from nearby – followed by a flock of parrots squawking into the air above the jungle.

  ‘What was that?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘That sounded like a gunshot,’ Camille said to her boss.

  ‘What?’ Lucy said, panicking.

  ‘Quiet!’ Richard ordered, trying to work out where the sound had come from. Like Camille, he’d already guessed that the sharp retort had been from a gun of some kind. But where had it come from?

  There was a second bang, and, without thinking, both Camille and Richard started running towards the noise – Richard this time pushing through the vines and vegetation without any thought for his personal safety – or that of his suit – and they soon b
urst out of the jungle and back into the blinding sunlight of the cobbled yard. There was no-one nearby. So where had the gunshot come from?

  Lucy joined them only moments later.

  ‘What do you mean, that was a gunshot?’ she asked.

  ‘Stay here,’ Richard said, before turning to Camille. ‘There might still be a shooter on the premises. We need to check the farm buildings.’

  Camille marvelled at how a man so personally timid could be so apparently brave when there was clear procedure to follow, but Richard was already heading off to investigate the nearest farm building.

  ‘Saint-Marie Police!’ he called out before entering the open door.

  Over the next few minutes, Richard and Camille announced themselves before entering the nearby farm buildings one by one, but there was no sign of anyone who might have fired the two gunshots, let alone any sign of what the gunshots might have been aimed at.

  Richard reconvened with Camille in the centre of the cobbled yard.

  ‘It was definitely a gunshot, sir.’

  ‘Two gunshots, Camille. I agree’.

  Lucy came over to join the Police, and Richard turned to her.

  ‘Do you have any idea why we just heard gunshots?’

  ‘No,’ Lucy said, but even as she said this, Richard and Camille could see the young woman’s gaze slide towards one of the few buildings they hadn’t yet searched. It was a long stone barn – a bit like a stables – with five evenly-spaced openings along the side, although Richard could see that the middle opening had a thick wooden door built into it. And while there was a gabled roof of red tiles running the length of the building, the area of roof directly above the central wooden door rose high into the air in a cone-shape that was shorn off at the top in a way that reminded Richard of the main body of a windmill. Or perhaps – more accurately – a Kentish oast house. But it was as Richard was looking up at the cone structure in the middle of the building that he realised he could see puffs of smoke or steam gently rising out of the top of it.

  ‘What’s that building over there?’ he asked Lucy.

  ‘It’s the old drying shed,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s check it out,’ Camille said, and started jogging towards the building.

  Richard and Lucy followed, and by the time they arrived at the building, Camille was already trying the handle to the heavy wooden door, but it wasn’t budging.

  ‘It’s locked,’ she said.

  ‘Is there a key to this room?’ Richard asked Lucy.

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s just an iron bolt you slide across on the inside.’

  Richard looked at the door and could see that it was ancient – maybe over a hundred years old – and it had wide black iron hinges holding it in place. It was the sort of door you’d expect to find on a safe-room in an old castle. Entirely solid, entirely impregnable, and with a locking mechanism that could only be accessed from the inside.

  ‘Saint-Marie Police!’ Richard called out. ‘Open up this door!’

  There was no answer. As Richard saw Camille go to investigate through one of the open doorways nearby, he turned to face Lucy.

  ‘Is there another way in?’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘No, it’s just an old room we’ve converted into a shower room. This is the only way in.’

  Richard stepped back from the door and looked up at the raised area of roof. Steam was now very definitely billowing out of the cone. So he took a deep breath, steadied himself a moment, and then ran for the door and shoulder-barged it.

  His left shoulder exploded in pain, and he recoiled in a whimper.

  ‘Bloody hell, that hurt.’

  Then, as he rubbed his shoulder to get some feeling back into it, he saw Camille re-appear from the nearby doorway, but now she was holding a massive sledgehammer. Where the hell had she got that from?

  ‘Is there any other way in?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not that I can see, but I found this,’ she said.

  ‘A sledgehammer?’

  ‘We need the strongest person here to smash that door in.’

  ‘And you think that’s me?’

  ‘As it happens, no, but you’d be offended if I didn’t ask you first. So please be as quick as you can, sir, we need to get in there.’

  Camille shifted the weight of the sledgehammer over to a now speechless Richard and went to stand with Lucy.

  Richard now realised that he was wearing a beautiful woollen suit while also holding a super-heavy weapon of destruction. The sort of super-heavy weapon he’d always seen manly men use. The tiniest hint of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.

  He turned to face the door and took a moment to steady himself. And then, knowing that he was now holding hundreds of pounds of power in his hands, Richard opened his mind to all of the resentments he felt at being posted to the tropics. How he couldn’t get a decent pint of bitter, a slice of bread, or even a proper cup of tea. How he’d found a black scorpion lurking in one of his slippers that morning. Then Richard thought about how bloody hot it was at all times, and how desperately he craved just one morning of crisp winter, with mist hanging in the air, and frosted grass crunching underfoot. And, as he gave in to his normally-suppressed feelings of frustration at the almost infinite vicissitudes of his life, Richard felt a powerful wave of emotion rise up inside him and, before he even knew he was doing it, he was swinging the sledgehammer through the air and thumping it dead-eyed into the door just beneath the handle with a thunderous crack.

  Richard exhaled. Oh, that had felt good. But had it worked?

  Richard saw the door swing back an inch on its hinges, and he could see that the frame had splintered where the bolt had torn free of its housing.

  Richard caught a look of wonder on Camille’s face, but she was quick to hide it when she realised that her boss was looking at her, and she pushed past him to enter the shower room. Richard dropped the sledgehammer to the ground as Lucy entered the room after Camille, and then he followed .

  As he stepped into the room, Richard was almost instantly swallowed by a fog of hot steam. Remembering that Lucy had called this building ‘the shower room’, Richard guessed – and could also hear – that a powerful shower was turned on somewhere nearby.

  Richard wafted the door open and shut a few times to help clear the steam, and he was soon able to see that the room was empty – although, now he was looking, he could see that there was an object slumped on the floor to the left hand side of the room.

  The object looked like a human body.

  A human body that wasn’t moving.

  As Camille went to inspect the body, Richard was pleased to see that Lucy had kept her distance and was standing on the other side of the room.

  ‘Please don’t move or touch anything,’ he told Lucy, indicating that she was to stay exactly where she was, and he went over to the shower that was built into the side of the wall, and which was thumping hot water down onto the mosaic-tiled floor to the side of the body. As Richard twisted the dial on the wall to turn the shower off, he saw that the body belonged to a man.

  ‘He’s dead, sir,’ Camille said.

  Richard saw that the dead man looked to be in his sixties. He was wearing old jeans, a cheap grey shirt that was frayed at the collar and seams, and a tatty old pair of trainers that had once been white but were now grey and falling apart. Richard also saw that the man had matted grey hair that went down to his shoulders, and a nicotine-stained beard that was similarly straggly.

  But what was perhaps most noticeable was the handgun that Richard could see was loosely held in the dead man’s right hand where it lay on the floor. And seeing as there was no-one else in the room when they’d smashed the door in, Richard realised that it was pretty obvious what had happened here. The man – whoever he was – had come into the shower room, bolted the door from the inside, and then committed suicide by shooting himself with the handgun.

  Before Richard rolled the body over to reveal the dead man’s face, he brie
fly noticed that the man lay on the floor directly between the shower and the drain that was set into the centre of the mosaic-tiled room. And although the water from the shower had run down to the old man on its way to the metal-grilled hole in the floor, his body had formed something of a barrier, and the water had gone around him on either side on its way to the drain. In other words, Richard realised, the shower hadn’t been running long enough to really drench the man’s clothes and start seeping underneath the body as it ran away. The area of floor that lay directly between the body and the drain was still bone dry.

  This briefly puzzled Richard. After all, it made sense that the man would have turned on the shower before committing suicide. It was a well-known – if somewhat macabre – fact that most suicides were carried out with some consideration for those who were about to discover the body. This was why so many gun suicides happened in bathrooms. The person about to commit suicide knows that bathrooms are altogether easier to clean of blood than any of the other rooms in a house. And the fact that this man had turned on the shower and positioned himself by the drain before he shot himself suggested that this suicide was no different. The man had wanted to make sure that whatever blood he created with his death would be sluiced away afterwards.

  But if the shower had been turned on before the man had taken his own life, the tiles should have been wet all the way between the shower and the drain. After all, while it was plausible that the body became a barrier to the water after it had collapsed to the floor, it didn’t seem possible that no water at all had made it to the drain before the man had killed himself. And yet, the tiles between the dead body and the drain were entirely dry. Maybe there was some kind of timer on the shower that had turned on after the man had killed himself, Richard wondered to himself. Either way, Richard filed away the puzzle of whether the shower had been turned on ante or post mortem for later consideration.

  It was time to turn the body over and discover the man’s identity.