‘It’s not true.’
‘So Rosie is lying?’
‘No. It’s just she didn’t know what had happened. And she still doesn’t know.’
‘So what really happened?’
‘I’ll tell you once – and then that’s it. Okay? I was in the garden when I was a kid. That much is true. And I saw something on the ground by the sand pit we used to have over on the east side of the house. So I got closer and I saw it was a bird. I didn’t know what sort. But it was already dead. And all its entrails had been pulled out and were on the grass to the side of the bird. Like the bird was having an operation. Looking at it made me feel physically sick. I couldn’t work out who could have done that to it. But I saw Lucy’s knife on the grass next to the dead bird. You know, her pocket knife. Anyway, I picked it up, and was holding it, and that’s when I saw Nanny Rosie emerging from a bush nearby. When she saw me holding the knife, she went crazy. Shouting at me for cutting the bird up, even though I kept telling her I was innocent.’
‘She didn’t believe you?’
‘No, she took her belt off, smacked me real hard with it, and sent me to my room without any supper.’
‘She smacked you?’
‘Don’t be put off by how old and frail she is now. When she was younger, she had a violent streak in her. She ruled this house with an iron fist.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, trying to absorb what he’d just learned. ‘So it wasn’t you who killed the bird?’
‘I just said, didn’t I?’
‘Then who do you think it was?’
‘I don’t care. It wasn’t me, that’s all that matters. Okay?’
Richard decided that it was time to get back to the apparent coincidence of Tom asking Lucy to store a document in her safe three days before the murder, so he returned to Tom’s desk – but as he did so, he glanced into the metal waste paper basket to the side of the room and noticed that there was something black and charred at the bottom of it.
To Camille and Tom’s surprise, Richard got down on his hands and knees and looked inside the bin. He could see that were three or four black pieces of burnt paper.
Richard picked up the little metal bin and took it very carefully over to Tom’s desk.
‘Mr Beaumont, have you set fire to a piece of paper in this bin?’ Richard asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s just I was about to ask you about the piece of paper you told Lucy to store in her safe, when I noticed that someone seems to have burnt a piece of paper in this bin here. It’s fallen into a few pieces.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘In which case, can you tell me how big the document was that you gave to Lucy?’
‘I don’t know. It was sort of A4 in length, but it was a bit thinner. It was a long strip of paper with a load of names written down it.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, and returned his attention to the charred paper in the bottom of the bin. There were four separate pieces, and they all appeared to be quite narrow.
‘I think you need to tell us what’s really going on.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The fact that there’s a document that seems to have gone missing from Lucy’s safe. And here’s a document that someone seems to have burnt in your office bin. On the same day, I hasten to add, that your biological father was killed by a handgun that we think was also taken from your sister’s safe.’
‘Look,’ Tom said, ‘what does it matter? It’s obvious the man killed himself.’
‘What’s that?’ Richard asked. He’d been waiting for the moment that someone tried to push him into believing that Freddie’s murder was suicide. After all, Richard had already guessed that the killer’s plan had been to make the scene look like death by suicide. So, did the fact that Tom was now mentioning this mean that he was maybe their killer?
‘Only I can’t see how it could have been murder,’ Tom said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, it’s kind of obvious. Lucy told me how you had to break down the door to the shower room, didn’t you? And how there wasn’t anyone else in the room when you opened it up. So doesn’t it just make more sense that Freddie went into the shower room, locked the door and then shot himself? I’ve no idea why, but maybe it sort of makes a warped kind of sense. He comes back to the family home to end his life.’
‘And how do you think he managed to get hold of Lucy’s gun?’ Richard asked sceptically.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Or do you think it’s likely that a man who was, in effect, a complete stranger to you all would have known that your sister kept a gun in her safe, and would then have been able to get into the house to get it?’
Richard looked at Tom, and there was perhaps a moment of indecision, but then Tom just shrugged again, trying to make it look as though he wasn’t bothered one way or another. Okay, Richard thought to himself, if that was the way Tom wanted to play it.
Richard despatched Camille to get Dwayne and the Crime Scene Kit again. He knew that if he could get the pieces of burnt paper safely back to the station, then he’d maybe have a chance of forensically revealing what was written on them before they were burnt. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was a possibility.
Within the hour, Richard had carefully sandwiched each piece of charred paper between glass plates, and he was standing with Camille by the Police jeep while Dwayne loaded the new evidence and the Crime Scene Kit into the back of it.
‘So what do you think of Tom, sir?’ Camille asked her boss.
‘I don’t get him,’ Richard said, pulling his handkerchief out of his top pocket and wiping the sweat from his face and back of his neck. ‘He goes to all this effort to look all laid back, but it turns out he’s doing a forensic audit of the family business.’
‘I know what you mean, sir. I think there’s a streak of vanity in him that isn’t healthy.’
‘You do?’
‘Because he wants to be everyone’s friend. Doesn’t he? That’s why he wears those clothes and speaks like he does. But he also thinks he can single-handedly turn the business around. Even though no-one else has. Not if the plantation’s been losing money since 1979. So, his father’s failed. And his grandfather, for that matter. But Tom thinks he’s the guy who can be the family’s saviour.’
‘You’ve got a point there, Camille,’ Richard said, impressed – not for the first time – with his partner’s insight into a witness’s psychology. And the more he thought about it, the more he decided that Camille was very possibly right. He had even felt it for himself during the interview. Tom tried to pretend that he was humble and low status, but there’d been a strong streak of pride in the way he’d answered the Police’s questions.
And there was no doubting – in Richard’s mind at least – that this was a murder that was carried out by someone who was supremely arrogant. After all, the killer had shot Freddie dead inside a room that could only be locked down from the inside, and yet he or she had then managed to escape from the locked room by the time the Police had broken in. It was almost as if the killer were challenging the Police to have the wit to solve the murder – which was pretty much a textbook definition display of arrogance, Richard thought to himself.
So was Tom their killer?
Richard turned to look back at Beaumont Manor and was surprised to see a figure standing at an upstairs window looking down on them all.
It was Sylvie.
But as Richard looked at her, Sylvie turned from the window and vanished from view.
CHAPTER SIX
Rather than go back to the Police station with the pieces of burnt paper, Richard got Camille to stop off at a photography supply shop so he could buy a packet of photographic paper, some plastic trays and all the necessary chemicals for developing photos. They then went back to his shack on the beach where he pulled an old blanket out of
a wooden chest and rootled around in a drawer until he’d found a red lightbulb. This wasn’t the first time he’d used his home as a makeshift photographer’s studio for a murder case.
Richard had learned the technique he was about to use from an old FBI handbook from 1929 that he’d found in a dusty pile of books in a store room at the back of the Honoré Police Station. Dwayne had suggested that they take all of the old books down to the beach, cover them in petrol, make a bonfire and then throw a big party, but Richard had insisted on bringing them back to his shack so he could see if any of them were of any interest. And, in fact, these ancient Police manuals had proved hugely useful, if only because they all came from a pre-digital age, so whatever forensic techniques they described were generally ones that Richard found he could replicate even with Saint-Marie’s limited resources.
First, he knew he needed to create a darkroom, so he used the blanket to block off the light to the area beside his fridge in the house’s little kitchen annex. With the red lightbulb screwed into a table lamp placed at his feet – so he could have illumination in a wavelength the photographic paper didn’t pick up – Richard got out the first burnt piece of paper that he’d safely transported between two glass plates. He took off the rubber bands that had been keeping the plates firmly fixed to each other. He then put the plates down on a little shelf and oh-so-carefully lifted the first glass plate up, trying not to disturb the fragile charred paper that was now open to the air again. Richard then placed an A4-size piece of undeveloped photographic paper over the charred fragment and put the glass plate back on top of the paper so that the photographic paper would be held firmly in place. He then turned the whole contraption over, removed the other glass plate, put a second piece of photographic paper over this side of the burnt paper and then replaced the glass plate. He then wrapped rubber bands around the glass plates to keep them secure.
Richard had created a sandwich with the burnt piece of paper now fixed tightly between two A4 pieces of photographic paper – that were themselves held in place by two glass plates and rubber bands. He then put the sandwiched evidence inside a thick black plastic bag that he knew would stop all light from penetrating. And, once he’d fixed another set of elastic bands around the whole thing to make sure the black bag was firmly wrapped around the glass plates, he then repeated the process for the remaining three pieces of burnt paper.
After forty-five minutes of painstaking work in the sweltering heat of his makeshift studio, Richard emerged, covered in sweat, but with a sense of great satisfaction. According to his old FBI manual, if a document had handwriting on it before it was burnt, then the charred pieces of paper would still carry the faintest of indentations where the pen nib had pressed into the paper. And it should be possible to get a photographic imprint from these faintest of indentations. All you had to do was fix undeveloped photographic paper to both sides of the fragment of burnt paper – it had to be fixed to both sides as it wasn’t possible for the naked eye to tell which side of the fragment was the side that had writing on it – and then you left it all in a place where there was no light, for example inside a heavy black plastic bag.
The theory said that the photographic paper would, over time, develop a ‘ghost image’ of whatever faint indentations had been on the paper before it was burnt.
The only problem with the whole technique was the fact that the manual made it clear that the photographic paper had to be left to develop for at least a fortnight, and there was no guarantee it would even work by the end of the process. After all, as Richard had privately admitted to himself, there was actually no proof yet that there had even been anything written on the paper in the first place. But his instincts said that if the piece of paper had been burnt, then it must have been burnt for a reason, and the most obvious reason was because it contained information that implicated one of the suspects in some kind of wrong-doing. The pieces of paper might even reveal the identity of the murderer.
There was only one way of finding out. And that was for Richard to wait patiently for two weeks until the photographic paper had worked its magic on the evidence. And luckily for Richard, he knew that waiting patiently was very much his long suit.
Over the next few days, Richard tried to press his team forwards with the case, but it was difficult to make significant headway.
At first, Fidel had written Rosie Lefèvre’s name on the whiteboard as a possible suspect, but when they checked the times of her trip to Montserrat on the morning of the murder, they discovered that her alibi held up. Customs at Honoré Port didn’t actually check passports when passengers left the island – of course they didn’t, Richard found himself thinking – so they didn’t have any records proving her journey out. But when they got hold of Rosie’s credit card statement, they were able to piece together her movements that day. On the morning of the murder, she bought a return ticket at 9.30am for the 11am ferry to Montserrat. Montserrat customs were then able to send through a CCTV screengrab of Rosie clearing customs at 12.30pm, which was when the 11am ferry had docked.
When Dwayne followed up by going down to the Customs Shed at the harbour, he found the man who’d sold Rosie her ticket on the morning of the murder. What was more, the man distinctly remembered serving Rosie because, after she’d headed off to catch her ferry, he realised that she’d left her credit card on the counter top. Rosie returned that afternoon after the ferry had got back from Montserrat, apologised for having left her credit card behind by mistake, and thanked him for looking after it.
But if Rosie could be ruled out, then that left Freddie’s immediate family as the most credible suspects. And the mystery three-wheeled vehicle driver, of course. Fidel still hadn’t been able to find the vehicle that had been up at the plantation on the morning of the murder.
Although Richard was trying to keep his team focused on the immediate Beaumont family, he soon discovered that Camille was also trying to work out what had happened to Lady Helen after she’d walked out on her family. Camille was puzzled by Lady Helen’s last words to Rosie, that she was going to visit her family. What exactly had she meant by that?
‘Well, that’s obvious,’ Richard said. ‘She must have meant her parents. Or siblings. Or cousins, even. You, know, Camille. Family.’
‘I know, sir,’ Camille said, ‘but how can we work out who all of those people are?’
‘Well that shouldn’t be too hard seeing as she’s the daughter of an Earl,’ Richard said, going to Camille’s computer and firing up her web browser. ‘You see, our country’s obsession with nobility means that there are all sorts of lunatics out there running websites that detail the genealogy of the British aristocracy – alive or dead – going back hundreds of years.’
‘There are?’ Camille asked sceptically.
Richard typed ‘Lady Helen Moncrieff’ into an internet search engine, and within seconds he’d found a number of websites that listed all of the dozens of members of her immediate family. Camille was amazed that all of this private information was freely available online, but it meant that she had the names she was looking for. And, once she had the names, it didn’t take too long for her to get the contact details of Helen’s immediate and not-so-immediate family.
First she tried phoning Helen’s parents at their house just outside Dorchester in Dorset, but she seemed to be unable to get through to them. The phone was always picked up by a man called Stephen who claimed to be the family butler. After considerable confusion on Camille’s part, it eventually became clear to her that the reason why Stephen claimed to be the family butler was in fact because the family did indeed have a butler, and his name was Stephen.
And while Stephen always said he’d pass on Camille’s message to the Earl and Countess that she wanted to talk to them about their daughter, Lady Helen, no-one ever called her back. In the end, Camille had to explain that if neither the Earl nor the Countess contacted her, she’d be forced to get in touch with the local Police and get an Officer to come to the house to take a
formal statement.
The Earl himself rang Camille that afternoon, but it was an entirely fruitless conversation. At Richard’s insistence, Camille had put the call on speakerphone so they could all listen in, and they all heard the Earl explain in wine-soaked tones that he was very sorry but there really was very little he could say that could possibly help the Police. He had four children, Helen was the youngest, and she’d always been ‘not quite right in the head’. The Earl was entirely matter-of-fact as he ran through the list of Helen’s suspensions, rustications and eventual expulsions from various private schools throughout her childhood. And he remained just as brusque as he then went on to explain how he’d had to cut his daughter off without a penny long before she hooked up with ‘that nasty piece of work, Freddie Beaumont’.
As for what had happened to Helen following her disappearance, the Earl explained that he and his wife had lost touch with her even before her third child Matthew was born. Furthermore, it was only in 2003, when Freddie got in touch to ask for some cash, that he and the Countess discovered that their daughter had vanished four years beforehand. The Earl explained that he obviously refused to give Freddie any money, but he’d also felt at the time that there wasn’t much he or his wife could do if Helen had decided to disappear herself. And the Earl was adamant that his daughter hadn’t been in touch with him or his wife – or anyone else in the family, as far as he was aware – from that day to the present.
Following this conversation, Camille decided that the Earl was so horrible that it was highly unlikely Helen had been referring to him when she said she was going to visit ‘family’. It must have been someone else she was referring to. So Camille printed out the personal details of Lady Helen’s three older siblings and decided to contact them next.
As for the rest of the team, Richard kept Fidel scouring the roads and byways of Saint-Marie looking for the three-wheeled van with the cut in the front wheel that had been up at the plantation on the morning of the murder, and he tasked Dwayne with pulling whatever financial information he could get on the family. In particular, seeing as Lucy said that the business was losing money, Richard wanted to see the company accounts for the plantation.
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