02 The Case of the Hidden Flame

by Alison Golden

  The next morning, Barnwell had only just set up the reception desk for the day when the phone rang.

  “Gorey Police Station, Constable Barnwell speaking.”

  “Ah, good morning. It’s DI Graham.”

  “Morning, boss,” Barnwell said brightly. “You’re up early.”

  Graham ignored the remark. This was, Barnwell found, a trait of the DI’s. He was all business, no chit-chat. No time to shoot the breeze when there was a murderer on the loose. “Let’s meet in the lobby of the White House Inn as soon as you can get here, Barnwell. Leave the desk to Roach. I’ve got an assignment for you.”

  As he replaced the receiver, Barnwell couldn’t help but think, with an enjoyable jolt of Schadenfreude, just how jealous Roach would be. Perhaps Graham’s arrival was his passport to promotion and security. A couple of decent performances on the job, and he might even be made Sergeant once Janice moved on. It was a heady thought.

  Barnwell found Graham hard at work in the lobby, despite the early hour. “It’s true what they say about birds and worms, Constable Barnwell,” Graham assured his colleague. “People’s memories tend to be at their freshest after a good night’s sleep. That initial boost of sugar and a strong cup of tea can do wonders for recall,” he said, toasting Barnwell with a fine china cup. It brimmed with a hard-to-find Japanese tea, redolent with the scents of a misty meadow. “It’s amazing what details we’ll hear today that were unavailable just a few hours ago.”

  Mrs. Taylor emerged from the office, looking fresh from the shower. “No cancellations last night, I’m happy to say!” she reported, bustling around her office and then heading into the dining room to check on preparations for breakfast. Barnwell followed Graham, who was peppering the proprietor with questions, toward the smells of bacon, eggs, and sausage. His stomach growled plaintively. He’d planned to grab his usual, leisurely mid-morning bacon sandwich at the St. George Café near the station, but with Graham’s diligent attitude to the morning hours, there simply wouldn’t be time.

  His daydream of a plate piled high with cooked breakfast was disturbed by the demands of his profession. “Barnwell, I want you to investigate the Pilkingtons, Alice Swift, and the Colonel until you’re certain that you know every detail of what they did yesterday between the hours of ten and two.” Barnwell’s shoulders swept back, and his spine straightened like that of a parading soldier. “Leave nothing to chance. No detail is too small, no finding irrelevant until proved so. I need to know how well they all knew each other, and especially, for how long. You with me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Barnwell snapped out. “I’ll get right on that.”

  “Well,” Graham said, checking his watch. “Maybe let them get out of bed first. It’s not even seven.”

  “Will do, sir,” Barnwell said, slightly less martially. “What about Constable Roach?”

  “I’ve got something else in mind for him. Just stick to those four people like glue, and write down everything,” Graham told him. Then there was a cheeky grin. “You can, can’t you?”

  “Sir?”

  “Write, Barnwell.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Constable replied, entirely without irony.

  “I’m pulling your leg, man.” Barely even a smile. Graham shrugged off the urge to sigh at the man’s plodding, unimaginative sincerity. It takes all sorts to make a police force. And this kind of assignment should sort the police from the sort-of police, he mused silently. “Off you go, then. Remember, every detail written down. See you about lunchtime.” He gave Barnwell a comradely chuck on the shoulder. “Come and get me if you discover something momentous.

  Graham spent a few more minutes striding through the hotel alongside the perpetual whirlwind of morning energy that was Mrs. Taylor. She wasn’t meaning to be unhelpful, the proprietor explained, she was just trying to run a busy hotel in the summer. Graham ascertained that she’d told him every last useful thing, expressed his gratitude once more, and retreated to the lobby.

  Sergeant Harding was already in the back office, checking their list of interviewees. “You know, there’s one guest we haven’t spoken to at all yet. This guy,” she said, tapping the list. “Likes to set up his meal reservations in advance,” she said, proud of this modest piece of sleuthing.

  Graham thought for a moment. “Set up an interview, Sergeant. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

  A few hours later, Carlos Alves was sitting in a deck chair on the Inn’s garden terrace, overlooking a calm sea which sparkled in mid-morning sunshine. Cigar smoke wafted on the breeze. He had thick, black hair that made its own decisions. He wore a white, cotton summer shirt and Chinos. As he rose to shake Graham’s hand, the Inspector judged him to be a little over fifty, but in good shape, and with surprisingly rough hands.

  “I take it that you sail,” Graham said after the pleasantries were exchanged.

  Carlos glanced down at his hands and smiled. “Perhaps it doesn’t take a detective to know this, eh? I have a motor-sailer, thirty-four foot, harbored in Cowes. I like to sail between the islands in the summer. Normally, I stay on Guernsey or Sark. I like the quiet there.”

  For a mainlander like Graham, even one who grew up in the remoteness of the Yorkshire dales, the idea of spending extended time somewhere smaller than Jersey was close to unimaginable. Sark was barely bigger than his own village back home. “Beautiful islands,” he said neutrally.

  “Maybe you are surprised,” he guessed. “Why don’t I go down to the Greek Islands or the Pacific, no?”

  Graham shrugged slightly. “We all tend to end up wherever makes us the most happy.”

  A change came over Carlos’ face, and it became stern and businesslike. “You are here,” he said in his most serious tone yet, “about the death of Dr.Norquist, yes?”

  “That’s correct,” Graham said. “We’re interviewing everyone at the hotel, and…”

  “I’m glad she’s dead,” Carlos said. He looked away at the ocean, then back at Graham, as if challenging him to make an accusation.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Alves?” Graham asked, shocked. The case seemed to crack wide open.

  “She was a terrible woman.” He raised a finger as if in warning. “And a dangerously incompetent doctor.”

  Graham wrote down every word, wishing for once that he had some recording technology to capture this moment of confession. “I’m listening,” was all he said.

  Carlos sighed deeply. “But I did not kill her.”

  Graham’s whole physicality seemed to sag under him. Bugger. “But you knew her well?”

  “Well enough,” he explained, taking a long sequence of puffs on his cigar, as though the nicotine hit might steel him for this emotionally fraught discussion. “She was the doctor of my son. His name was Juan-Carlos.”

  Again, no detective’s badge was needed to discern quite what had happened. “I’m sorry, Mr.Alves.” He felt it better to ask less and simply listen.

  “He was sixteen years old. Can you imagine that, Inspector?” Carlos asked, his face etched with pain now. “He was healthy, happy. Full of life. He played soccer for his school. Was chasing girls all the time,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Then he says he finds problems in walking. His legs won’t do as they’re told,” he explained. “Then his vision becomes strange, seeing two of everything. Then at dinner times,” Carlos went on, “he can’t swallow, almost choking on his food.”

  “It sounds terrible,” Graham said consolingly.

  “Our doctor, he didn’t really know. But there were tests, and tests and more tests,” Carlos said, reducing a year of worry and heartache and despair to a few words, “and they find a tumor. Here,” he said, fingers at the very back of his neck, where the spine meets the skull.

  “A brain stem tumor?” Graham asked gently.

  “Is operable, but is difficult,” Carlos continued. “You need real professional,” he said, fist in his palm, every syllable clear. “The best.”

  “And so you first met Sylvia.”
/>   Carlos nodded, and then lifted the cigar to his mouth again but stopped short, gave Graham a rueful, slightly ashamed look, and placed it back in its ashtray, forgotten. “My wife, Gloria. She has a friend whose baby girl had the cancer… Oh, Inspector, the most terrible kind. Of the eye,” he said, pained at the memory. “Two years old. But Sylvia was assigned to the little girl, and she survived!”

  “Medical science is remarkable,” Graham commented.

  “Ah, no,” Carlos said, hands aloft. “This was not just science, according to my Gloria. No, no,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “This was Jesus. She was as certain of this as we are certain that we’re on Jersey. She was absolutely convinced that the sacred spirit came down and saved that little girl. The spirit, working through Sylvia. Do you understand?”

  With his parents’ relaxed attitude to church-going, particularly as their children grew older and found other ways to spend their Sunday mornings, Graham had never been a devoted man of faith, but he respected the sincerity of those who were. “I think so, sir.”

  “Gloria insisted on having Sylvia as our doctor. And if you ever met her, you would know that if she insists on something, it’s gonna happen, you know?” he chuckled. “No matter that Sylvia wasn’t a specialist in brain cancers. No, it would be Jesus guiding her hands, and he would deliver our son from this devil-cancer. You see?”

  Graham could see mostly how a family was torn apart by grief and by the tragic results of a poor decision. He could also see that his initial hopes of hearing a confession were being well and truly dashed. If anyone he’d so far met possessed a comprehensible reason to want Sylvia dead, it was this man. However, to Graham, this did not sound even a little like the confession of a murderer.

  “Sylvia studied and practiced and got advice from everyone,” Carlos explained. “She made it her life for months, to attack this difficult and complex cancer like a battle, like she was fighting for her own life, you know?”

  “But, despite her efforts, the treatment failed?” Graham asked with all the sensitivity he could find.

  “She should have refused to treat him. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Carlos stood and made for the ocean, but after a few steps, stopped and turned. “You know, I understand boats. And shipping, you know, freight and that kind of business. But I became an expert on the human brain stem. I could give you a lecture right now,” he assured the detective, “like a professional, on every aspect of it. But to put it in a few words: it didn’t work, and my son died.”

  “A most dreadful tragedy.”

  “And it could have happened to any patient, treated by any doctor. But it happened to my son, treated by her.” The pain, Graham could plainly see, was undimmed by the passing of time, and seemingly not even a little assuaged by the death of Dr.Norquist.

  “Mr.Alves,” Graham began, “I’m sure you realize how this might seem, to an investigator.”

  “I’m a grieving father, Inspector,” Carlos said. “Not a fool.”

  “Then… I must ask if you know anything that might help with our inquiries?”

  Carlos reclaimed the cigar, shaking his head. “I was on Guernsey yesterday, Detective. I sailed back overnight. It’s my favorite time to sail, in the cool and the dark. Nobody else around.” He puffed on the cigar. “There are harbormaster’s records on both sides,” he assured Graham.

  “I have no reason to suspect you’re being dishonest with me, sir. But I have to admit you do have a pretty strong motive.”

  “And perhaps,” Carlos said, cigar aloft in an expansive gesture, “a jury would not send me to jail. But imagine if they did. I’m fifty-three years old. I would be an old man when I got out, if I ever did. I could not sacrifice my remaining years, all of the time I have left with my Gloria, who is already without her son, just to punish this woman. I could not.”

  Another page was filled with cursive handwriting. Carlos used the silence to say something that stilled Graham’s hand.

  “I shouldn’t say this,” Carlos said, tapping off the cigar ash, “but I wish to express my thanks to whoever is responsible for this crime. Truly. I ask God’s forgiveness for this, but it is how I feel.” He stopped, puffed once more. “Are you a father, Detective?”

  For barely a second, Graham paused in his writing, his eyes clouding over. He shook his head, “No”.

  “Hold them close,” Carlos said, his eyes glistening. “You never know how long they will have.” With that, he turned back toward the ocean, his cigar lodged between his lips now, puffing intently, watching the sailboats rounding the headland at the tip of the beach.

  “Thank you for your time.” Graham stood and headed straight back inside, filling in his notebook quickly, before the memories faded.

  Graham drank tea with a mechanical, heedless air, sitting alone in the Inn’s tea room. It was fairly quiet, perhaps half an hour before the lunch crowd would begin to arrive. And rather than bringing together the facts in an orderly, determined way as he had before, Graham was letting the thoughts come as they may. The tea helped, as it always did. Perhaps the sea air, also. Sometimes, he found, an investigator needed to simply shut up and allow a well-trained mind to do its work.

  “Constable Roach?”

  The young officer was standing discreetly in the lobby, almost hidden by a giant coat stand. “Morning, sir.”

  “I need you to do something for me.” Moments later, Roach was on his way down to the harbormaster’s office, searching for news of an arrival early this morning. Graham believed that he knew genuine grief and a genuine story when he experienced them, but he’d never be able to look his colleagues in the eye if Carlos turned out to be the murderer and all Graham had done was sit with the man for a sympathetic chat.

  “Sergeant Harding, do you have a phone that can play videos?”

  Harding proudly showed him her phone, one of the latest models. It had cost well over a week’s salary and worked like a charm. Graham explained what he wanted, and they sat together to review some of the search results.

  “You see, we’ve been going about this all wrong,” Graham told her. “We’d assumed that the journey from here at the Inn,” he said, tracing the path on the table in front of him with his finger, “down to the beach would have been awkward and painful for Sylvia.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Harding agreed.

  “But what if…” he said, turning the phone to give them a larger view. “What if it were absolutely impossible?”

  The video showed part of the trials of a new drug. A lady of Sylvia’s age, perhaps a year or two older, was struggling to walk. Sweating, pale, and in immense pain, she could barely take three steps together, on level ground, clasping a handrail as though she would drown without it. “Sergeant,” he said with a smirk, “I don’t know how often you find yourself saying this, but…”

  “Constable Roach was right,” she conceded. “There’s no way on God’s green earth that Sylvia Norquist walked down those steps. No way at all.” Harding raced to put two and two together. “So she was carried?”

  “In broad daylight. At lunchtime. On a beach at the tail end of summer.” Graham grimaced. “That, believe it or not, is our best theory, as it stands.”

  Harding thought for a second, then shut down the phone and looked square at her boss. “If I may quote the distinguished philosopher, Jim Roach, sir… I think that’s bollocks.”

  Constable Barnwell checked in throughout the day. He was a little like a child sent off to find the toothpaste aisle in the supermarket but uncertain whether his parents would still be there when he got back. Although unused to individual responsibility, the Constable was proving himself a surprisingly tenacious investigator, and Graham was pleased to see him writing reams of notes.

  His more responsible colleague, Constable Roach, had also done his best for the new boss. Carlos Alves had, in fact, traveled back from Guernsey that very morning, and the particulars of his stay on Jersey’s sister island and his smart
sailboat all checked out. Graham could not rule Alves out of the investigation entirely, as he would have preferred, however. The history between Alves and the deceased was far too compelling for that, but Graham could at the very least put aside suspicion of any direct involvement in the killing. Besides, Graham pondered over yet another pot of fine tea later that afternoon, Alves was neither the kind of man, nor was he carrying the kind of grudge that spoke to poisoning as the preferred method of murder. He could well imagine a calculating, incensed Alves beating Sylvia to death or strangling her as he watched the last light leave her eyes, but not poisoning.

  No. Something else was going on, and they were still some way from what any investigator worth their salt would call a “lead.” Graham finished the tea, feeling enervated, quick of mind, and light of feet as he often did at these times, and called Dr. Tomlinson.

  “Do call me Marcus, old chap. I have a feeling we’ll be spending a great deal of time together, and I don’t hold with needless formality,” Dr. Tomlinson told him.

  “Marcus it is, although I’m sorry to disturb you so late in the day. Do you have plans for dinner?” Graham wondered.

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Two hours later, in a quiet corner of the Bangkok Palace, the two men were being served cold, crisp Thai lager and an initial snack of sticky rice that came with an incautiously ferocious dip called jaew bong. Fearless of spicy food, Graham found to his delight that the innocuous-looking dip was laced with pungent shallots and searing chilies.

  Tomlinson, far more wary, resolved to dip each ball of rice only fleetingly into its midst. “Christ alive,” he muttered. “I might be too old for this kind of thing. How about a nice, uneventful coconut curry?” he asked the waiter. Graham ordered something that was marked with three chilies on the menu, and the waiter gave him a knowing smile, as if both impressed at Graham’s audacity and slightly fearful for his continued wellbeing.

  “So, I suppose we’re all rather curious,” Tomlinson began. “What brings an accomplished Detective Inspector like yourself…”