‘So you’re saying that the Beaumonts still have enemies on the island?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Dwayne said. ‘But although there’s plenty of islanders who work on their plantation when it comes to harvest time, there’s very few who are happy working there full time.’
‘Yes. We saw that today, didn’t we? There was no-one else up at the plantation apart from the family.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So what do we know about the members of the family?’
Here, Camille got up some handwritten notes from the mess of her desk.
‘Okay, so Hugh Beaumont is fifty years old, is solely in charge of the plantation, and from the few enquiries I’ve made, he’s considered a pretty fair boss. Unlike his father William, who he took over from when he died back in 2001.’
‘You can say that again,’ Dwayne said. ‘William was a tyrant.’
‘He was?’
‘Sure was, Chief. The man was bad news. After Mount Esmée erupted back in 1979 and the coffee fields were wiped out, he drove his workforce to breaking point getting them to clear away the ash, rework the soil and replant the coffee plants. And all along he promised them a serious bonus if they got the fields ready again by the next growing season. When they’d completed the task – and in time – he gave them their bonus, which turned out to be a 10-kilogram bag of coffee each. It was a scandal at the time.’
‘Dwayne’s right,’ Fidel said. ‘My mum talks about that winter after the eruption. It was really tough on the whole island. Everyone had to pull together.’
‘And William Beaumont took advantage of all of the island’s goodwill,’ Dwayne said. ‘I remember there was an accident one day. One of the pile-drivers that was being used to put in wooden posts for the coffee plants crushed one of the workers, killing him. William didn’t even allow anyone from the plantation time off to attend the funeral. It was all about getting the place back up and running again.’
‘So William was a nasty piece of work,’ Richard said. ‘But you’re saying he died in 2001, and his son Hugh is less of a tyrant?’
‘Got it in one,’ Dwayne agreed. ‘As far as I know, Hugh runs the place pretty fairly. I’ve got a few mates who do seasonal work for him. He pays on time. And as long as you work hard, he doesn’t mind too much if you arrive a little bit late or leave a bit early.’
‘So he’s one of the more acceptable Beaumonts? Could we say that about him?’
‘More acceptable,’ Dwayne agreed, making it clear from the way he leaned on the word ‘more’ that it was all relative.
‘Then what about Sylvie Beaumont, his wife?’
‘Well, she’s interesting,’ Camille said, getting up a Saint-Marie newspaper article from 1991 on her computer monitor. ‘She’s the same age as Hugh – fifty years old – and her engagement to him made the Saint-Marie Times twenty-five years ago. In this article here it says she was originally from Maldon in Essex, and that she met Hugh in a bar on Saint-Marie when she was over here working as a holiday rep for Club Caribbean.’
The Police knew Club Caribbean well. It was full of twenty- to thirty-year olds who came to the island to have ‘fun’ which, Richard had too often had cause to notice, seemed to involve ingesting vast amounts of liquid before ejecting an equivalent amount again only a few hours later – which hardly seemed ‘fun’ to him.
‘Ha!’ Richard said out loud. ‘I knew there was something about her accent that didn’t ring true.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, let me put it this way, I don’t think the matriarch of Beaumont Manor who we met this morning spoke in quite the same plummy accent when she was a holiday rep from Maldon in Essex.’
‘And you should know,’ Camille added, ‘that she seems to be in the newspapers every month. She’s chair of this charity, sits on the board of that marine preserve, you know? She’s a do-gooder.’
‘A do-gooder who’s vain enough to want everyone to see just how much do-gooding she’s up to. Very interesting. Good work, Camille. Then what of their children? In particular, can you explain why everyone speaks with a British accent except for Tom?’
‘Well, that’s easy to explain, sir. Tom speaks with a Saint-Marie accent because he went to Notre Dame School here on Saint-Marie.’
‘And Lucy and Matthew didn’t?’
‘Lucy also went to Notre Dame, but obviously decided not to pick up an island accent. As for Matthew, he was sent to boarding school in the UK. But going back to Tom, he left school with excellent grades, and has just finished an undergraduate course studying Agriculture at the University of Miami.’
‘Which is hardly the impression he gave to me this morning.’
‘You mean with his cannabis T-shirt and island attitude?’
‘Exactly. So why is a bright young man with academic qualifications pretending to be a counter-culture stoner, do you think?’
A silence descended on the room as Richard’s team all stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
Eventually, Dwayne spoke.
‘Did you just say “counter-culture stoner”, Chief?’
‘Yes,’ Richard said, somewhat irked. ‘I’m not entirely out of touch with street argot, you know.’
‘No, sir,’ Camille said, trying to stifle a laugh.
‘What’s that, Camille?’
‘Oh, nothing sir. Just caught something in my throat.’
Fidel stepped into the breach.
‘And sir,’ he said. ‘You should know. I rang a cousin of mine when we got back to the station. I reckoned Tom would have been at Notre Dame at the same time as him. Anyway, my cousin said that Tom was one of the most popular kids in his year. He was clever, but he didn’t make a big deal about it. He played football, but he didn’t join any of the teams. He did his own thing. Oh, and he liked to party, and party hard. That was the other thing my cousin said.’
‘So he wasn’t tainted by the family name?’
‘He was a “good guy”. That’s what my cousin called him.’
‘Okay. Thanks for that. Then what about the other two siblings?’ Richard said, turning back to face Camille.
‘Well, sir,’ Camille said, returning to her notes. ‘Matthew’s the youngest. By some distance. He’s eighteen – Tom is twenty-two, and Lucy is twenty-eight – and he came back to the island this summer having left boarding school in the UK.’
‘Do you know which boarding school it was?’
‘Eton College.’
‘He went to Eton, did he?’ Richard said, Matthew’s easeful manner clicking into place for him. This was because Richard had come across quite a number of Old Etonians while he’d been at Cambridge, and, to his abiding irritation, every single one of them had been entirely and effortlessly charming. Not that that excused or justified their background of privilege, Richard felt. And nor did it mean that Richard could ever bring himself to trust or like someone who came from such a wealthy background. To his mind, it was simply wrong that so much should be given to so few, and he couldn’t help but resent the opportunities that were afforded to this wealthy minority – no matter how charming they always were when you met them in the flesh. As far as Richard was concerned, if private boarding schools like the one Richard had been sent to were ‘wrong’ – and Richard knew that they were very wrong – then schools like Eton were wrong to the power of ten.
‘Hang on, though,’ Richard said, suddenly realising something. ‘You’re saying that Matthew – the youngest sibling – was sent to Eton, but Tom – his older brother – went to the local comprehensive school on Saint-Marie?’
‘That’s right,’ Camille said, already knowing where Richard was going with this. ‘As was Lucy.’
‘There’s a story there,’ Richard said.
‘You could be right, sir,’ Camille agreed.
‘Then what have we got on Lucy?’ Richard asked. ‘What do we know about her?’
‘Well, sir, she’s pretty interesting,’ Camille said, picki
ng up another set of notes. ‘Because she left Notre Dame school when she was seventeen years old without finishing formal education, and since then she doesn’t seem to have done much of anything. She doesn’t have a job at the plantation as far as I can tell, she doesn’t file tax returns – even though she’s twenty-eight years old. But better than that, I found two hits for her on the Police computer.’
‘You did?’
‘First, she was pulled in for shoplifting when she was twenty years old. She’d been caught stealing a dress from the market in Honoré, but was let off with a caution.’
‘And the second time?’
‘It was shoplifting again. When she was twenty-three. This time, it was a silver necklace that she was caught stealing from the Caribbean Sands hotel.’
‘And was she charged?’
‘That’s the thing, sir. She wasn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve no idea. Seeing as it was her second offence. But you should know, sir, Charlie Hulme was the arresting officer.’
Charlie Hulme had been the corrupt Detective Inspector who’d preceded Richard’s arrival on the island, and Richard could well imagine how the Beaumont family might have leant on him to make sure he didn’t press charges.
‘Ah, I see,’ Richard said. ‘But there’s a streak of criminality in her, is that what we’re saying?’
‘That’s what it seems like to me.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ Richard agreed, going to look at the names that he’d written up on the whiteboard that acted as the focus for all of his investigations.
‘So, in summary,’ he said, ‘we’ve got Hugh Beaumont running the family plantation with a gentle hand on the tiller. He’s married to the one-time holiday rep Sylvie, who now thinks herself something of a grand dame of the island. And as for their three children, we’ve got something of an enigma in Lucy, although we know she’s been light-fingered in the past; a popular party animal in Tom who just happens to have a heap of qualifications including an Agricultural degree; and the eighteen-year old Matthew, who’s only just returned to the island having been educated at one of the most privileged schools in the world. Something of a mixed bag, then.’
‘And none of them has a clear alibi for the time of the murder,’ Camille added.
‘Not so,’ Richard corrected. ‘None of them has a clear alibi for the time of the murder apart from Lucy. Because, no matter how criminal her past might have been, you and I were with her when the two gunshots were fired, so she’s the only member of the family who can’t be our killer.’
‘And we still don’t even know the identity of our victim,’ Camille added.
‘Or how the killer then escaped from a locked room afterwards,’ Richard agreed. ‘Or whether the three-wheeled vehicle that was up at the plantation before it rained was part of the murder or not. So we’re going to have to redouble our efforts. And I suggest we focus on our victim’s identity, because I don’t see how we’re going to get anywhere with this case until we work out who he was. So, let’s snap to it.’
As the afternoon wore on, Richard and his team made steady progress, but none of it seemed to take them any closer to uncovering the identity of the victim.
Richard even realised that he couldn’t presume that the victim – if indeed he were a Brit travelling on his own – had even arrived on the island by plane. What if he’d arrived by boat? So he put in a call to the Harbour Master in Honoré and learned that while it would theoretically be possible to get a list of every solo Brit who’d arrived by boat and cleared customs in the last month or so, there were so many bays on Saint-Marie that there was nothing stopping any potential solo sailor from dropping anchor in a quiet cove and illegally accessing the island from there. When Richard asked if the Harbour Master knew of any boats who’d recently arrived unannounced like this, the man had just laughed at how naive the question was.
Richard was left deeply frustrated. If their victim had arrived by plane, it was going to take until the following week to get a list of British arrivals. And if he’d arrived by boat, it would have been possible to sneak onto the island past customs and immigration anyway. How were they going to work out who the victim was?
It was Dwayne who made the first breakthrough.
‘Okay, sir, the weapon we found in the victim’s hand is a Glock 19,’ he reported back to Richard. ‘It’s not listed on the gun register of the island – meaning it must have been acquired illegally. And although I’ve been able to lift three partial fingerprints from the handle, they all belong to the victim. As for the rest of the gun, it’s been wiped clean. So, whoever carried out this murder must have worn gloves. Or wiped the gun of fingerprints before putting the victim’s hand around the handle after he was dead to make it look like suicide. But the fact that the gun has been obtained illegally – and has been wiped of prints, sir – suggests we’re dealing with a killer who knew what he or she was doing.’
‘I’d agree with you there,’ Richard said.
‘But the big news is, I’ve been able to lift a fingerprint from one of the bullet casings we found at the scene. And the fingerprint doesn’t belong to the victim.’
‘It doesn’t?’ Richard asked eagerly, heading over to Dwayne’s desk.
‘It doesn’t,’ Dwayne said. ‘Meaning, the killer may have wiped the gun clean of his fingerprints, but he forgot to wipe the bullets he used. Or didn’t know that one of his fingerprints was already on one of the bullet casings.’
‘And you’re sure the fingerprint on the bullet casing doesn’t belong to the victim?’ Richard asked.
‘One hundred per cent. It belongs to someone else.’
‘Then see if you can match it with the exclusion prints we took from the Beaumont family this morning. As a matter of urgency. The fingerprint could belong to our killer.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Dwayne said.
As Dwayne went to gather the family’s exclusion prints to start his comparison, Fidel called over from his desk.
‘Sir, I think I’ve identified the make and model of our three-wheeled vehicle.’
‘You have?’ Richard asked, thrilled that the case was finally picking up momentum.
‘I think so. The dimensions of the axle, wheel width and tyre patterns mark the vehicle out as almost certainly being a “Piaggio Ape 50”.
‘And what’s one of those when it’s at home?’ Richard asked.
Fidel pulled up a picture of the vehicle in question, and Richard realised that he knew the type of vehicle well. There were hundreds of the bloody things all over the island: vans that were no more than souped-up three-wheeled mopeds like the tuk-tuks of Thailand, but with a flat wooden loading area at the back for carrying goods instead of space for two passengers. As far as Richard was concerned, he’d spent far too many hours stuck in the Police jeep behind these over-loaded menaces, and his eyes narrowed at the prospect of identifying what this particular vehicle had been doing at a murder scene.
‘Right, Fidel,’ he said, ‘I want you to make this your top priority.’
Fidel was surprised. ‘You do, sir?’
‘I just said, didn’t I? We know this particular Piaggio has a distinctive cut in its front wheel. So I want you to get a list of all the registered Piaggio 50s on the island, and then take that plaster of Paris cast to visit every single one of them until you’ve identified whose vehicle was up at the murder scene just before our victim was killed.’
‘But sir, these sorts of vehicles are bought and sold for cash all the time. I’m not sure all that many are correctly registered up at Government House.’
‘I know, Fidel. So maybe this is our chance – finally! – to bring one of these illegal vehicles to justice!’
Richard realised a bit too late that he was possibly coming across a bit too much like a tinpot tyrant, but he didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned, these vans were a scourge of the island, and he, through the agency of Fidel, was going to be the sword of truth that finally managed
to skewer one of them. Assuming that Fidel could identify the van, of course. And prove that it had indeed been up to no good when it had been up at the plantation. But these were mere details to be worked out once the van was identified.
Richard looked at his team, hoping to see the same sense of missionary zeal in their eyes, but didn’t. He could tell from the way that Camille was now cocking her head slightly to one side, that she was maybe considering whether he needed psychiatric help or not.
Luckily for Richard, the awkward silence was broken by the sound of footsteps on the veranda outside. They all turned and saw a little old lady standing on the threshold. She was wearing a purple dress and had tightly-curled grey hair.
‘Hello,’ she said in a friendly voice.
‘Hello,’ Dwayne said. ‘Can we help you?’
‘I don’t know, but I hope I can help you,’ she said. ‘My name is Rosie Lefèvre. I’m the Beaumonts’ housekeeper.’
‘You are?’ Richard was surprised. The tiny old woman in the doorway looked as though a strong breeze could knock her over.
‘Then come in, come in,’ Camille said.
Camille fussed around Rosie and set her up on a chair in front of Richard’s desk. She then got a bottle from the office fridge and poured the old woman a glass of cold water.
‘Thank you so much,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s really quite a steep climb up to the Police station from the harbour.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Camille agreed.
‘Anyway,’ Richard said. ‘You said you could help us?’
‘Well, I don’t know about that, but Hugh rang me and told me the terrible news.’
‘And when was this exactly?’ Richard asked, pulling out his notebook and pencil from his inside jacket pocket.
‘Just after I’d arrived on Montserrat.’
Death Knocks Twice Page 6