‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘You know what? It turns out that Xyrax is a trade name for a sedative you might have heard of called gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, otherwise known as GHB.’
‘No way,’ Fidel said, stunned.
Richard was no less amazed. ‘You’re saying that Paul’s boss suspects he’s been stealing a drug that just happens to have been the very same drug that we found in the suspects’ tea when Aslan was murdered?’
‘Got it in one.’
Richard and Camille were both waiting outside a pine-clad building at The Retreat as Paul and Ann emerged, having just had what Richard could see from the label next to the door had been an ‘Aromassage’ session.
‘Oh. Hello,’ Paul said a touch suspiciously as soon as he saw the police.
‘We’d like to search your room again,’ Richard said, just as easily.
Ann was surprised by the request, but Paul was shocked. ‘Why? Rianka’s already told us you’ve looked once, why do you need to look again?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Richard said. ‘That was looking for a notebook. We’re looking for something else this time. It should only take thirty seconds.’
Paul and Ann didn’t have much choice, so they accompanied Richard and Camille back to the main house and up to their room. As they went, the other guests at the hotel kept looking at Ann and Paul as they walked in between Richard and Camille, and Richard could see how troubled Ann was by all their stares. After all, it was well known by now who Richard and Camille were, and why they were there. Being seen with the police was clearly making Ann deeply uncomfortable.
But not Paul. He just seemed irritated.
As they entered their hotel room, Camille went straight into the bathroom to start looking for any contraband Xyrax pills.
‘What are you looking for?’ Ann asked, worried.
‘We’re just pursuing a lead,’ Richard said evenly, ‘but in the meantime, let me tell you a story. Because we’ve known for some time that one of the people locked in the room with Aslan must be our killer. And, fortunately for us, we’ve found a cracking motive for four of you: Aslan stole money from you all in the past. And yet there’s a paradox with this motive. Because, for anyone to have carried out such a meticulously planned murder, they must have known Aslan’s real identity well in advance. At the very least, they would have had to come to the Caribbean with an idea that they already wanted him dead. So remind me, when did you both arrive at The Retreat?’
‘I don’t remember exactly,’ Paul said carefully, and Richard wondered if he’d already worked out where he was going with his story.
‘Seven days before he was killed,’ Richard reminded Paul and Ann. ‘In fact, you were both due to finish your holiday and go back to the UK the afternoon that Aslan died. But the previous seven days was plenty of time to learn how bookings for the Sunrise Healing worked. Plenty of time to see how there was a tea-drinking ceremony. Plenty of time to see that guests sometimes did the washing up after meals, and that included the chance to dry the kitchen’s carving knives. Tell me,’ Richard said, turning just as conversationally to Paul. ‘Did you kill Aslan Kennedy?’
‘Of course not,’ Paul said dismissively, and Richard noticed how Paul was exuding an air of utter calm and composure, his balding pate still carefully supporting the threads of hair that so perfectly arced over from his left ear to his right.
But whereas Paul was composed, Ann most certainly wasn’t. One moment she was sitting on the end of her bed, the next she was up and looking to see what Camille was doing in the bathroom, and Richard once again took a moment to marvel at the outfit that Ann was wearing. With her hair bouffed and her voluptuous body encased in an electric-blue jumpsuit that was elasticated at her wrists and ankles, Ann looked like Margaret Thatcher crossed with a flying squirrel.
‘Stop fussing, woman,’ Paul said as Ann straightened the corner of a bedspread.
‘No. Of course,’ Ann said, sitting down immediately, the bed giving a squeak of protest as it sank under her weight.
Richard turned back to Paul.
‘Oh okay, then can you tell me why you’ve been in contact with Aslan so much over the last couple of months?’
Paul seemed puzzled by the question. ‘I haven’t.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘That’s right,’ Ann chipped in. ‘I was the only person who spoke to Aslan. And it was only a quick call. Just to confirm the details of the holiday.’
‘I know,’ Richard said to Ann. ‘You rang The Retreat on the fourth of May at 12.10pm for just over seven minutes.’
Ann was surprised that the police could possibly have known this, but Paul was beginning to look at Richard a lot more carefully.
‘That’s right, we’ve been through your phone records, Mr Sellars.’
‘Then you’ll know I’ve not been in touch with Aslan Kennedy.’
‘Not from your home, but you have from work.’
While Paul remained a blank, surprise slowly registered on Ann’s face.
‘Three times in the last two months. The shortest phone call being twelve minutes; the longest, twenty minutes. Or are you denying it was you who phoned Aslan on those occasions and for those lengths of time?’
Paul barely missed a beat as he said, ‘Look, it’s not what it seems,’ as smoothly as he could. ‘I was intrigued by what I’d seen in the brochures we’d been sent, I was bored at work, so I rang up and spoke to this guy who said his name was Aslan. But I only wanted to confirm what was on offer. You know. The various remedies—and treatments—and whether they were all free or whether we’d have to pay for some of them.’
‘I’m sure it didn’t take three conversations totalling over forty minutes to establish that everything would be free, Mr Sellars.’
Paul paused a moment before giving his answer. ‘It did.’
‘No, I don’t think so. So how about you tell me why you really needed to talk to Aslan Kennedy for so long?’ Richard asked.
Paul gathered his thoughts, and then tried to soldier on. ‘Well, no, perhaps—if you put it like that. But the thing is, I rang him that first time to find out what treatments would be included in the price, but I really liked Aslan when I spoke to him and …’
Paul didn’t quite have the heart to continue with the lie, so Richard decided to help him out. ‘So you rang him another couple of times just because you liked chatting to him.’
‘That’s right,’ Paul said, before licking his lips.
‘You’re lying.’
Paul took an in-breath to protest, but before he could speak, Richard said, ‘You recognised his voice that first time you spoke to him, didn’t you? Or you recognised his face on the brochures you were sent for The Retreat. But either way, you knew perfectly well that Aslan Kennedy was really the man who’d conned you and Ann out of your money twenty years ago.’
‘No,’ Paul said.
‘It wasn’t a question, Mr Sellars, it was a statement of fact. Nothing else would explain the repeated calls—and not from your home where they could easily be traced. From your place of work. And before you consider continuing to lie, you should know that if you don’t start telling me the truth I’m planning to arrest you on suspicion of murder.’
‘There’s not much suspicion,’ Camille said as she entered from the bathroom holding a little white tub. ‘We have all the proof we need here,’ she said as she handed the tub over to Richard before turning back to Paul. ‘You see, your manager told us that someone’s been stealing a sedative called Xyrax from your pharmacy.’
Richard looked down at the tub in his hand and could see that there was no label, which suggested it hadn’t been legally prescribed. But the lid was already off and Richard was able to pour some of the orange chalky tablets onto his hand. Each pill had XYRAX carved into its surface.
‘So can you tell me,’ Richard said, ‘seeing as your boss says she’s been suspecting you’ve been stealing Xyrax from work, what you’re doing with a tub of unprescrib
ed Xyrax in your hotel room in the Caribbean?’
Paul didn’t even begin to know what to say, so Richard decided to help him out again.
‘Because you should know, we now know the tea you were all drinking just before Aslan was brutally stabbed to death was laced with gamma-hydroxybutyric acid—which I don’t need to tell you is the active ingredient of Xyrax.’
As Paul’s face fell, Ann stood up from the bed as though she’d been stung. ‘No! Paul, tell me it isn’t true? You didn’t …!?’
Violence seemed to engulf Paul from nowhere as he spat at his wife, ‘Just shut up, would you? This isn’t about you, not everything’s about you!’
Richard could see how furiously bottled-up Paul was, so he discreetly nodded to Camille and she got his message at once.
Camille went and sat on the armchair next to Paul’s.
‘It’s simple, Paul,’ she said calmly. ‘If you’re the killer, you’re welcome to carry on lying to us. That’s okay. That’s what killers do. They lie. But if you’re innocent, you really need to start telling us the truth right now.’
As Paul looked at the kindness in Camille’s face, a little tear appeared in the corner of his right eye and he angrily rubbed it away with the palm of his hand.
Camille waited.
‘Alright,’ he said eventually, only just keeping his emotions in check. ‘You’re right. I don’t know how, but I recognised Aslan’s face the moment I saw it on the brochure we were sent. I didn’t know who it was, I just knew that I recognised him if you know what I mean. I’ve been a pharmacist my whole life. You get good at faces. And I had this niggle that I knew him from somewhere in the past.
‘But I didn’t let it bother me, I just kind of filed it away, and then—a few days later—it came to me. You know, obviously my subconscious had been working on it while I wasn’t thinking and it arrived just like that, all in one go. He wasn’t Aslan, he was David Kennedy, the guy who stole from us all those years ago. I couldn’t believe it. What was he doing now running a health spa in the Caribbean? And above all else, why was he offering me and Ann a free holiday?
‘So I rang him, you’re right. And from work. I didn’t want Ann knowing. After all, I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he was in fact David Kennedy, but I asked him when he set up The Retreat, if he’d been in the hotel business his whole life—you know, that sort of thing. And I could tell he had a good idea I was onto him. It was there in what he wasn’t saying as much as in what he did say.’
‘How do you mean?’ Camille asked.
‘Like he said he’d been at The Retreat since 2000, but he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing before then. And he wouldn’t say what exactly the competition was supposed to be that Ann and me had entered online and won.
‘It took a couple of phone calls to be sure, but by the third one, I realised that the strangest thing of all was the way that Aslan—as he was now calling himself—always seemed to have time to chat with me.’
‘At which point, you stole the Xyrax from work as part of your plan to kill him.’
Paul looked at Richard and shook his head slowly.
‘That’s got nothing to do with this.’
‘Even though the gamma-hydroxybutyric acid all of the suspects had in their bloodstream the morning Aslan was killed must have come from crushed up Xyrax pills that could only have come from you?’
Paul didn’t know what to say to that, so Camille asked him much more gently, ‘Then tell us. If you didn’t steal the Xyrax as part of your plan to kill Aslan, why did you steal it?’
Paul knitted his brows and Richard noticed that he’d started rubbing the palms of his hands together like a man in the middle of some kind of psychological trauma.
And for a long moment, Camille just held the man’s stare.
Richard couldn’t help but admire this quality in his partner. Because while he knew Camille to be almost infinitely irritating, he couldn’t deny that she had the most uncanny ability to make others think she was kind, compassionate and someone you’d want to tell your problems to.
‘Come on, Paul,’ Ann bullied, ‘tell them—’
‘Because of her!’ Paul’s arm shot out as he pointed his finger accusingly at his wife. Ann was stunned by the accusation, but Paul hadn’t finished.
‘Because I live with this pointless woman, just look at her! She hasn’t got a thought in her head, she believes everything she’s told, and she talks and talks—and talks!—the whole time. Have you any idea what that’s like? Living with someone who just won’t shut up? So yes, I took the Xyrax, it’s a sedative—and have done for years because it’s not addictive like valium—it just takes the edge off the constant barrage of noise. You know? Although you can’t possibly know what it’s like living with her!’
Paul was panting as he finished this tirade, and Richard finally managed to place Paul’s supposed superior drawl from the earlier interviews. How he seemed to be hiding behind an entirely stand-offish manner.
Paul wasn’t superior, and nor was he stand-offish. He was on sedatives.
‘So yes, I’ll admit to everything. I knew who Aslan was long before I came out here. And I’ve even been stealing Xyrax from work. But for my own use, you understand. If there was any trace of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid in the tea we drank during the Sunrise Healing, then I’ve no idea how it got there—because you’ve got to ask yourself: why on earth would I want to kill Aslan?’
‘He stole from you,’ Camille pointed out.
‘No he didn’t. He stole from Ann—and now you know what I think of her—do you really think I’d cross the street for her, let alone commit murder for her?’
Richard looked over at Ann and saw that she was staring at her husband as though at a stranger, the tears rolling silently down her cheeks.
‘And anyway,’ Paul said, with grim satisfaction, ‘if you’re looking for someone who’s known for a long time that Aslan was really David Kennedy, you need look no further than my wife.’
Ann started to shake her head in horror. ‘No,’ she mumbled.
‘Because if I could recognise David after all these years, I bet she did. She’s got a better memory for faces than even I have. And she’s always known about my Xyrax pills. Not how I get hold of them of course, but she knows that they’re a sedative and why I take them. And the thing is, I wouldn’t kill over twenty grand—not even if it were my money. Not after all these years. But Ann would, because it wasn’t just twenty grand you lost, was it?’ This last comment was aimed squarely at his wife. ‘It was your whole future David Kennedy stole from you when he took your money, wasn’t it?’
Richard and Camille shared a glance, both of them knowing that as much as they were disgusted by the triumph Paul was showing at spiking his wife like this, they wanted to know more.
‘It’s not true,’ Ann said, aghast. ‘I didn’t know Aslan was anyone other than who he said he was. And I didn’t know Paul’s drugs were a sedative, he’s lying about that. He’s always told me his pills were for his heart.’
Paul didn’t feel that he needed to rebut his wife, and Camille and Richard waited for Ann to continue, but she was clearly too lost in the pain of her husband’s accusation.
‘Then would you mind telling us how David Kennedy stole your future?’ Richard eventually asked.
Ann finally tore her eyes from her husband and looked at the police.
‘Very well. Twenty years ago, I was at music college. I’m a singer. Was a singer. A soprano, it’s all I wanted to do. And I knew I maybe wouldn’t make it as a professional, but I knew I had a chance. Paul’s right. It had always been my dream to sing on the stage. Not be famous, you understand, but to be—you know … just that. A professional. And I’d saved and saved so I could do the course. Paul didn’t understand what it was about. He never understood. He was off training to be a pharmacist. He had these big plans—not that he ever achieved them.’
‘Now look here,’ Paul started, but Ann wasn’t having any of it.
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‘You’ve had your say, Paul Sellars, now it’s mine,’ she said, standing imperiously as she did so and commanding the room. Having done so, she wafted over to the French windows, and Richard found himself wondering how much of the melodrama in Ann’s life was real, and how much of it was ‘play-acting’. Because now he’d learnt she’d always wanted to be on the stage, he found that he was finally beginning to understand her. Her flamboyant clothes, her larger-than-life persona; this was someone who was desperate for an outlet for their passions, but who didn’t have one.
‘You see, I only just had enough money saved to complete the course. And then a friend of a friend recommended this art-lease scheme to me. They said it was a licence to print money. And I ended up handing over all my savings, all twenty thousand pounds I’d managed to set aside for the course. By the end of that first year, I discovered I’d lost everything. Every penny. I was devastated. This was it. My vocation, and I couldn’t carry on.’ Ann took a moment to steady herself, the pain still clearly cutting her like a knife, and Richard was interested to see the anger in her eyes as she turned to look at her husband. ‘So I asked the college to hold my place open for me for a year because Paul said he’d get the money together for me to finish the course.
‘But the following year I discovered that Paul hadn’t been saving anything for me. The college couldn’t hold my place open for two years and I had to let it go. And I know it doesn’t sound like much, but this is all I’d ever wanted to do my whole life. I was that close … and that man took it from me.’
Richard was surprised to see that Ann was looking at her husband as she said this.
‘You mean, David Kennedy?’ Richard asked, confused.
‘No. He was a crook. I’d expect it of him. But Paul was my husband. His duty was to help me, and he never even lifted a finger.’
Richard took a moment to let the tension dissipate between Ann and Paul. When it didn’t, he stood up, signalling that the interview was coming to an end.
‘Then one last question, Ann, if you don’t mind. You see, looking at it from our point of view, Paul’s right. If he recognised Aslan’s true identity, it’s possible that you did as well. And despite you saying you didn’t know what Xyrax was, I could well imagine a jury believing that you’d look it up and learn that it was a sedative. And, as you’ve just admitted, you had more reason than most to want revenge on Aslan Kennedy. As you readily admit, he took away your chance of ever being a professional singer. But my question to you is this, and I want the truth this time. How did your fingerprints get on the murder weapon?’
A Meditation on Murder Page 18