‘I didn’t want anyone in Honoré knowing I was getting it. Our reputation’s bad enough without people thinking we’ve had an outbreak of rabies. So I went to the pharmacy further away.’
‘How very convenient.’
‘I’m telling you the truth.’
‘Then where is it now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where’s the 1080 poison you bought for Lucy?’
‘I don’t know. I gave her the packet and haven’t seen it since.’
‘Really? Then why didn’t we find the box in her room?’
‘I don’t understand. How do you mean?’
‘Only, if this was a suicide – like you’re saying – she wouldn’t have needed to hide the box once she’d taken the poison, would she? After all, she’d have known that her autopsy would reveal that it was 1080 that had killed her. So how come she apparently took this overdose and then hid the box somewhere so that we’d not be able to find it afterwards?’
‘Have you looked in her safe?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t in there. Any more than there was a suicide note anywhere in her room. And let’s not forget her last words. Just before she died, she tried to tell us that she’d been murdered by one of her family. And she was very much pointing in your general direction.’
Tom rose from his seat, anger boiling up in him.
‘No! She took her own life, that’s the only thing that makes sense! She killed Freddie. I mean, she’s spent long enough openly saying that she’d kill him if she met him. And she’s unstable enough to have done it, I tell you. But she wasn’t a bad person – not really – so I reckon she felt remorse afterwards, and that’s why she took her own life. Or are you really saying that I’m actually so stupid that I’d use poison that I’d bought from a central register – that I’d signed for myself – to kill my own sister with?’
‘You have to admit –’ Camille said, but Tom interrupted her before she could get any further.
‘Just because I didn’t go to Eton, doesn’t make me an idiot.’
‘Mr Beaumont!’ Camille said, but it was too late.
Tom had stormed out of the room, leaving a somewhat flabbergasted pair of Police officers behind.
After a moment, Richard straightened the knot of his tie.
‘Well I think we touched a nerve there,’ he said.
Camille was thoughtful.
‘He’s got a point, though. Hasn’t he?’ she said. ‘What sort of killer would sign for the poison he then used to commit murder with?’
‘A very stupid one,’ Richard said, and turned to look at the room. But he tended to agree with Tom. The killer wouldn’t commit murder with a poison that he’d so obviously bought. Unless it was all an elaborate double bluff, of course. But that didn’t seem too likely, did it? So, if Tom was telling the truth, why on earth had Lucy wanted him to buy the 1080 pesticide in the first place? Or to put it another way: what had Lucy done with the poison once Tom had given it to her? How on earth had it ended up being the substance that ultimately killed her?
With his mind now whirling with all of the unanswered questions of the case, Richard walked out of the building without another word, and Camille was left behind to marvel at how very ill-mannered her boss was. In fact, Camille had occasion to note her boss’s lack of basic manners for the rest of the afternoon, because, once they were both back at the Police station, Richard continued to work silently at his desk. Or he’d get up and look at the whiteboard. But always on his own, and always in silence.
As for the rest of his team, they didn’t want to admit as much, but they didn’t quite know what direction to take the case. After all, Fidel had finally found the three-wheeled vehicle that had been at the plantation on the morning of the murder. So that was explained now. And Richard hadn’t specifically tasked Dwayne with anything since he’d finished processing the physical evidence from Lucy’s murder.
As for Camille, she decided that, in the absence of any further instructions, she’d dip back into the mystery of exactly where Lady Helen had got to after she’d walked out on her family – even though she’d failed to find any official customs records of Lady Helen leaving the UK in June or July of 1999.
Camille found herself wondering if maybe the problem was that they were presuming that Helen had been up to some subterfuge at the time. It was an understandable presumption, of course. After all, according to Rosie, Helen had walked out of the house wearing only her red and white dress and white shoes, with no handbag or other bags to hand, and clutching only a twenty-pound note. However, Camille found herself thinking, what if they’d been overthinking the situation and Lady Helen really had been ‘going home’ that day? Home was surely her parents’ house that was just outside Dorchester in Dorset. So – continuing the process of trying to keep things as simple as possible – Camille tried to imagine what could have happened to Helen on the way ‘home’ that might have stopped her from arriving.
What if she’d had an accident? An accident in which she’d lost her memory maybe? Or worse, had died?
Although it was something of a long shot, Camille got up a rail map of Britain on her computer and looked at how Helen might have used her twenty pounds to return to Dorchester on public transport. The nearest train station to Lady Helen’s house was Maze Hill, and Camille could see that it was a relatively easy journey to get a train from Maze Hill up to Waterloo station. And from there, Lady Helen could have got a direct train from Waterloo that arrived in Dorchester two-and-a-half hours later. Then, once she’d arrived at Dorchester South, she’d have only been a few miles from her parents’ house. So maybe that’s what she’d tried to do that day?
Feeling a bit of a fool, but – again – without anything much else clamouring to get done, Camille started to contact all of the hospitals and police stations that were on the train route that Helen might have taken from Maze Hill back to Dorchester. Were there any women being admitted to hospital – or dying, even – whose identities were never established during June and July of 1999?
As for Richard, he remained a restless and snappy presence all afternoon. When it came to 6pm and time to finish up for the day, he bid everyone a terse goodnight and left without further comment. Camille continued to be unimpressed with her boss’s manners.
But what Camille didn’t appreciate was that Richard had spent the afternoon wrestling with an existential crisis. When he was investigating a murder case, he normally had a sense of forward momentum. Even if he didn’t know who the killer was, the leads always suggested where he should be focusing his attention. And, as the Beaumont case had unfolded, he’d felt that that was exactly the process that he was involved in. And then Lucy had been murdered, and that was what had been upsetting Richard so much. It wasn’t so much that he now didn’t know which way was up or down in the case any more, although that was certainly true. Nor was it the fact that his instincts couldn’t even begin to give him a sense of why Lucy had to die after Freddie had been murdered. No, what was gnawing at Richard was the sense that if he’d acted faster, or been smarter, Lucy might still be alive.
As an evening of self-reproach turned into a fitful night’s sleep of self-reproach, Richard increasingly found himself focusing on the fact that he had in his hands what could possibly turn out to be the key clue: the burnt piece of paper that he’d found in Tom’s bin on the day that Freddie was murdered. Putting aside the fact that the FBI manual said that Richard should leave the photographic paper undisturbed for at least a fortnight, he couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if he’d chanced his arm – like Camille had suggested to him – and discovered what had been written on the paper much sooner?
Would Lucy still be alive now?
By 5am, Richard gave up on ever getting to sleep and instead decided to go to the Police station. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and he unlocked his desk drawer that contained the packages of burnt evidence. Each sandwich of glass was wrapped inside a thick black plasti
c bag that was held tightly in place with rubber bands.
But did Richard have the courage to open the bags before the FBI manual advised? That was the question.
Richard remembered how he’d had a hunch that Hugh was still lying to them – and he’d later been proven correct. Maybe the time for following precise rules was over? Maybe he was a maverick rule-breaker now? It didn’t feel possible, but Richard felt he had run out of other options.
So, looking about himself to make sure that no-one could see him, Richard took his suit jacket off, folded it up, and put it carefully to one side. He then loosened the tie at his neck and undid the top button on his shirt. But that felt wrong, so he did his top button up again and reasserted his tie knot. There – that was better, he thought to himself. He might be about to bend a few rules, but this wasn’t Las Vegas.
Richard picked up the plastic bag he’d already stuffed full of his photographic kit and started constructing a quick studio at his desk. As it was the dead of night, he didn’t have to worry too much about light pollution, but he swapped his desk lamp’s light for a red lightbulb so he could have some light of the correct wavelength to see by. He then put out two plastic trays, each about A3 in size and a couple of inches deep. He filled one of them with developing liquid, and the other with fixing solution. And then – again, without stopping to think in case he lost confidence – he reached into the drawer of his desk and lifted out the four black plastic-wrapped packages of evidence.
He snapped the rubber bands from the first package, and then he cut open the black plastic bag to reveal the two glass plates that were held together by the next set of rubber bands. Holding the glass plates together with one hand, he picked up his scissors and snipped through the rubber bands. He then eased the top piece of glass off to reveal the ‘top’ piece of A4 photographic paper.
Richard knew that what he was about to do would irreparably destroy the burnt pieces of paper that were squashed to the other side of the photo paper. This was the moment of no return. If the photographic paper hadn’t had time to develop, there’d be no second chances.
Richard peeled the photographic paper up, and the charred paper that had attached to the other side of it fragmented and fell away in a mess – some of the black bits continuing to stick to the photographic paper underneath, some of them coming away still attached to the underside of the piece of photographic paper Richard was now holding in his hands. Next he picked up a blusher brush he kept in his desk drawer for such occasions, swept all the charred bits from the photographic paper so it was clean, and then slipped the now-clean photographic paper into the developing liquid. He then started his stopwatch.
This was the moment of truth – an image of whatever had been written on the burnt paper should appear magically before his eyes.
Nothing happened.
The seconds ticked past on his stopwatch. Twenty seconds gone. And still no image appeared. Thirty seconds. Forty seconds. Fifty seconds.
Nothing.
Although, was there perhaps the faintest of grey blushes appearing on the photo paper where the charred piece of paper had been? It was hard to tell. The stopwatch reached sixty seconds and Richard pulled the photographic paper out of the developing solution and dunked it into the fixing solution.
There was a barely-visible area of light grey on the photo paper, but no handwriting could be seen to the naked eye. The whole experiment was a busted flush, Richard thought to himself. But he’d started on a course of action now, and he knew he couldn’t turn back. He would develop every single piece of photo paper. Hopefully, one of them would have picked the indentations of the handwriting that had been on the paper before it was burnt.
An hour later, Camille, Fidel and Dwayne entered the station, having just had their breakfast at Catherine’s bar, but they stopped in mid-conversation as they saw their boss standing by the bead curtain at the back of the office. He was holding a magnifying glass to eight glossy pieces of photographic paper that he’d attached to the curtain with clothes pegs.
‘Sir?’ Camille asked.
Richard didn’t even turn around.
‘And good morning to you too, sir,’ Camille said as she went to her desk.
Richard still didn’t acknowledge his team’s arrival. Instead, he kept looking over the sheets of photo paper with his magnifying glass.
‘Chief, what’s up?’ Dwayne said, and crossed the Police station to join his boss by the bead curtain.
‘I opened the packages,’ Richard said.
‘What?’ Dwayne asked.
From the depths of his disappointment, Richard explained how he’d spent the night developing the pieces of photo paper that he’d attached to the burnt evidence they’d found in Tom’s bin.
‘But sir,’ Fidel said, ‘you said they wouldn’t be ready yet.’
‘I know,’ Richard said crankily, ‘but I changed my mind, didn’t I?’
‘You broke the rules?’ Camille asked, just as amazed as the others.
‘And as always happens when you break the rules, it hasn’t worked,’ Richard said, and stepped to one side so his team could see that although there was a light area of grey in the centre of each developed piece of photographic paper, it wasn’t really possible to see if there were any areas of white writing within the grey areas. The image was just too indistinct.
‘I can’t see any images of the handwriting,’ Dwayne said.
‘I know,’ Richard said. ‘I’ve ruined everything.’
‘You know what, sir,’ Fidel said. ‘We might be able to enhance this. All we need do is change the white and black balance.’
‘We do?’ Richard asked, not really understanding what Fidel was talking about.
With his boss’s permission, Fidel took one of the pieces of photographic paper over to his desk and used the office scanner to digitise the image. He then loaded the image into a photo editing programme.
‘Now, sir, all we need to do is tell the software to find everything that’s light grey in the image and turn it to jet black.’
Using the mouse, Fidel moved a pipette cursor on the screen until it was hovering over the area of light grey. He then clicked to load that colour into the palette of the software. He then moved a slider so that the grey colour turned black, and now that the greys of the image had become black, it was possible to see that there was the faintest – and thinnest – scrawl of white on the page.
It was handwriting. Old-fashioned handwriting.
‘You did it, sir,’ Fidel said to his boss, and Richard realised that he was dumbstruck. Not just because it looked as though his experiment had worked after all, but because he’d managed to get it to work even though he’d not followed the rules to the letter. In his mind, a strange and impossible-to-believe thought was beginning to form. Was this what spontaneity felt like? What being a rule-breaker felt like? After all, he’d rolled the dice – he’d gambled – and it had paid off. It was an intoxicating feeling.
It didn’t take long for Fidel to scan and change the colour balance of all of the photos. Four of them had no writing on them at all, as could be expected – they’d been attached to the side of the burnt piece of paper that had no writing on – but four of them were covered in scrawls of old-fashioned handwriting. Fidel matched up the images on the screen so that he was able to create a virtual image of the original piece of paper. It wasn’t an easy task, because the writing was so illegible – and there were plenty of lines and imperfections in the image from where the paper had once been folded over. There were also a few gaps in the list where the burnt edges of the paper didn’t quite match up. But Fidel got the images aligned so that it was possible to see what had been written on the paper before it had been burnt.
It was a list of names. Richard quickly checked them over.
Lily Aquarele
Sylvaine D’Or
Christophe de Souza
Julian Renouf
Morgane Pichou
Pierre Colville
&nbs
p; Gabriel Lefèbvre
Vivien Bowyer
Pamela Logut
Kirsty Harrison
Lucy Hanham
Stéphane Carrié
It seemed fair to assume that the piece of paper was the very same list of slave names from 1777 that Tom had asked Lucy to store in her safe three days before Freddie had died. But why on earth had someone removed it from the safe and then set it on fire in Tom’s bin?
Richard heard an email notification chime from Camille’s computer. As she went over to see what had just arrived, Richard got Fidel to print out the image of the list and he then took it over to the whiteboard and pinned it to the top of it. Richard guessed that it had to be connected with the murder somehow, but it seemed so improbable. How could a list of names from two hundred years ago be related to a modern-day murder? It just didn’t make sense.
‘Oh okay, sir, you need to see this,’ Camille said without looking up from her computer monitor.
‘Why? What have you got?’
‘I think I’ve finally found out what happened to Lady Helen.’
‘You have?’ Richard said, amazed, and he, Fidel and Dwayne converged on Camille’s desk at speed.
‘Because I contacted the hospitals and police stations that were on the train route Lady Helen would have used if she really was going home on the day she walked out on her family.’
‘You did?’ Richard asked, impressed – and he had one of his very brief flowerings of respect for his number two. This is why Camille was so good at her job, he found himself thinking – despite her very many and very obvious flaws. When she got her teeth into something, she didn’t let go.
‘So what did you find?’
‘Well, the first stop on the train line from Waterloo to Dorchester South is a place called Winchester, and Winchester Police Station was one of the places I sent my enquiry to. Anyway, they’ve just got back to say to me that on the 13th of June, 1999, a woman threw herself in front of a train at Winchester Station. She was killed instantly. And when they looked through her pockets, they didn’t find a single identifying document on her. She didn’t have a handbag. Or a wallet.’
Death Knocks Twice Page 23