A Meditation on Murder

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Come on, we could go in,’ Julia said.

  Richard froze.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We should go for a swim.’

  If he’d been wearing a suit, Richard would have straightened the knot of his tie.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been for a midnight swim?’ Julia asked, amazed.

  ‘I haven’t been for a swim.’

  Now it was Julia’s turn to be surprised.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I don’t even own a pair of trunks.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t … you know, I don’t like swimming in the sea.’

  ‘But you’ve swum in the Caribbean?’ Julia asked, amazed.

  ‘As it happens … no.’

  ‘You’ve got a private beach here, and you’ve never felt what it’s like to go swimming in that water?’

  Looking at Julia’s surprise, Richard began to realise how ludicrous his non-swimming policy must appear to others. He wanted to explain that the one time he went paddling in the sea, he’d trod on an anemone and ended up having to go to hospital to get a tetanus jab, but he had an instinct that maybe this wasn’t the time or place for a lengthy speech on the inadequacies of what passed for the island’s Accident and Emergency provision.

  ‘Well, that’s going to change,’ Julia said, decisively. ‘You’re going for a swim right now.’

  Richard began to panic. ‘What? I am?’

  ‘Come on, no one’s around, you have got to go for a swim, it’s like a bath out there.’

  ‘But I said, I don’t own any trunks.’

  Julia looked at Richard as though he were entirely stupid.

  ‘You don’t need to wear trunks.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that I do.’

  ‘You don’t need to wear anything at all. Come on,’ Julia said, a look of delight in her eyes. ‘There’s no one around. We can go skinny-dipping, just you and me!’

  Time seemed to slow down for Richard at that moment. But it also seemed to speed up—and bulge in the middle—and all while Richard seemed to have an out-of-body experience where he was looking at himself on the beach talking to a beautiful young woman who’d just suggested they both take their clothes off and go swimming together.

  ‘What do you say?’ Julia asked again, her eyes sparkling, as Richard just stood there like a statue of himself. ‘There’s no reason to be inhibited, it’s just our bodies. Come on, I’ll go first. Then you can follow.’

  Julia reached down, clutched at the hemline of her skirt and was about to pull her dress up over her head when Richard’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm.

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  Julia looked at Richard, surprise in her eyes. She then began to realise that maybe this wasn’t a trivial matter—or in any way fun—for Richard.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Richard said, ‘but I don’t do this. You know, go for walks with beautiful women. Or have them offer to take their clothes off.’

  Richard couldn’t have looked more confused, and Julia’s heart went out to him.

  ‘You’re stressed.’

  ‘Seriously. You have no idea.’

  ‘At the thought of going swimming naked with me.’

  Richard bit his lip a bit. ‘Uh-um.’

  Julia thought for a moment and then smiled. She let go of the hemline of her dress.

  ‘Hey, then it’s alright. If it would make you unhappy.’

  Richard didn’t say anything. His flight and fight mechanisms had both kicked in at the same time, and now he couldn’t move.

  Julia looked at Richard. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come. But anyway … I just wanted to thank you. For believing in me. You’re very lovely, you know that?’

  After a moment, Richard’s left hand wafted an inch from his body. It was all he could manage.

  Julia leant forward and gently kissed Richard on the lips. A butterfly kiss.

  She turned and walked away, and still Richard didn’t move. He was too stunned. Not that his encounter had ended with a kiss—he hadn’t even got to the bit in his memory where Julia gave him a kiss—he was still stuck on the bit where he told the beautiful woman not to take all of her clothes off in front of him.

  Self-reproach filled Richard. Why was he such a stick-in-the-mud? Why was he so boring? Why couldn’t he ever be spontaneous? What was he so frightened of? Where did this over-developed sense of propriety come from? He was a man, wasn’t he? A red-blooded male. And single, to boot. He turned and called out before he could stop himself.

  ‘Julia, would-you-like-to-go-for-a-drink-sometime?’

  Julia stopped and turned, moonlight briefly flashing across her golden hair.

  In the few hours Richard felt it took Julia to answer, he found himself remembering each of the three times in his life he’d asked a woman out for a drink. The first woman had said no. The second had barked a laugh and the one-word answer—’You?’—after which he’d felt so damaged by the experience that he’d waited nearly ten years before daring to ask anyone out again. And she’d said no as well.

  That was fifteen years ago.

  But as Richard looked now, he saw a smile appear at Julia’s lips.

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ she said.

  And with that, Julia turned and walked off the beach.

  Richard watched her go while his psyche was off doing cartwheels of joy across the beach. But then, he realised, he was a middle-aged man standing alone on a beach in the middle of the night wearing pyjamas and slippers. So he returned to his shack and went to bed.

  But as he turned down the corner on his book of sudoku puzzles later that night and switched off his bedside light, Richard found himself smiling to himself in the dark. He was almost feeling optimistic.

  The following day, Richard found that he was still feeling great. And so, while his team continued to try and track down Ben Jenkins, Richard found himself driving the police jeep at seventy miles an hour up to the highest promontory of Saint-Marie—a vertical cliff known locally as ‘Lover’s Leap’—with an empty tin of shortbread biscuits from Edinburgh on the passenger seat to his side.

  There were little air holes that Richard had stabbed into the lid with his metal compass.

  His mother had sent him the tin of biscuits for his birthday present the previous year. Unfortunately, the tin hadn’t arrived in time for his birthday as it had got lost in customs, and it had taken all of Richard’s detecting skills—and the judicious flashing of his police warrant card to any number of officials—to track the precious gift down, but a short three months after it had arrived on the island, Richard had finally got possession of his birthday present.

  That smell of butter and sugar as he’d popped the tin lid! It was the stuff that dreams were made of, and the forty-two consecutive days that Richard had been able to take a single shortbread biscuit with his morning cup of tea had been truly a Golden Age in the life of Richard Poole. And it wasn’t just because of the quality of the shortbread—that had, of course, been excellent—it was also that feeling of homeliness Richard had got from looking at the picture of Edinburgh Castle on the tin’s lid every time he had taken a biscuit.

  Although Richard had no Scottish blood in his family, he was proud to call himself British and this enamelled painting of an ancient castle on a granite rock—a kilted bagpiper in the foreground—spoke to him, he felt, at a deep level.

  But on the forty-third day, the supply of biscuits had run out—as Richard had always known would be the case even as he’d bitten into the buttery goodness of the first biscuit. But that was okay. Everything ended, whether it was life, the universe or a tin of shortbread biscuits. Richard had kept the empty tin, though. Of course he had. And, that morning, he’d used it to catch and trap Harry.

  All it had taken was a bit of vim and vigour, and Richard had found that he’d been blessed with both the morning after his encounter with Julia.

  In the end it had been easy. All he had had to do
was put out Harry’s cat food and mashed flies as usual and then wait crouched nearby with the tin ready. Only a few minutes later, Harry had skittered across the floor to his food—as Richard knew he would—and he’d been able to pounce, slamming the upturned tin down on top of the unsuspecting lizard with a cry of ‘Aha!’

  For a brief moment, Richard had panicked that he’d maybe banged the tin’s edge down through the little creature’s tail, but a quick search around the boundary of the tin’s edge showed no evidence of a guillotined tail.

  He had Harry trapped.

  Richard hadn’t known why it had taken him so long to realise that he didn’t need to kill Harry to get rid of him, he just had to release him back into the wild. That’s all. And releasing Harry back into the wild was even the right thing to do. Lizards shouldn’t be domesticated.

  And if the place he released his lizard was both a good few miles away from his shack and also near the highest cliff on Saint-Marie, well then, that was just one of those things.

  But as Richard took the hairpin bends up to Lover’s Leap with the occasional squeal of protest from the jeep’s tyres, his thoughts weren’t really on the lizard—and nor were they on the murder case—because he still couldn’t get over the fact that a beautiful woman had tried to go skinny-dipping with him the night before. And just as impossibly, she’d then agreed to go out for a drink with him at some unspecified time in the future.

  Bombing into the car park by Lover’s Leap, Richard slammed on the brakes and the wheels briefly locked as the police jeep slid across the gravel and came to a stop with a judder.

  Richard was briefly startled. He must have been driving much faster than he’d thought, but—equally—he didn’t want to overthink what he was doing here. Not now he was a man of action.

  Richard grabbed up the biscuit tin, stepped out of the jeep and was instantly buffeted by what felt like a violent gale. This high up, there was always a strong hot wind coming in off the sea and racing up the cliffs. As his suit jacket flapped and his tie flew out behind him, Richard pushed against the gale and carried the tin over to a grassy area nearby.

  Crouching down, he popped the lid of the metal tin with his thumbs. He then very carefully eased the lid off and looked inside.

  The shortbread tin was empty.

  The lizard had vanished.

  Richard looked inside the tin again, but there was no getting around it. The lizard was no longer there.

  So where was he?

  Cold dread began to trickle through Richard’s body as he realised what must have happened. He looked at the lid he’d removed and oh so slowly turned it over so he was looking at the underside of it.

  Harry the Lizard was holding on with his suckers and looking at Richard with what was a frankly insolent grin. Yeah, well, Richard thought to himself, that was the last time Harry would trick him.

  Richard carefully lay the lid down on the grass so Harry could scamper off to his new life.

  Only, Harry didn’t move.

  Instead, he just looked up at Richard with a cheeky grin.

  Oh well, Richard thought to himself, Harry was hardly Richard’s responsibility any more. He could just leave him here. But as Richard turned away, he realised that Harry was still standing on the underside of the biscuit tin lid. A biscuit tin lid that Richard liked looking at.

  Richard’s irritation spiked as he returned to the tin lid, pulled out his hankie, got back down on his haunches and started to waft it near to Harry’s face.

  ‘Shoo!’ he said.

  The lizard didn’t move.

  ‘Go on … skedaddle!’ he said.

  Harry looked up at Richard as though he was expecting to be fed.

  ‘Look, you’re a lizard, would you please leave me alone!’

  Still nothing from Harry.

  Richard decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. He carefully picked up the tin lid at the edges and gently tried to shake Harry off.

  Harry seemed to hunker down and hold on as though it were a game.

  ‘Oh come on!’ Richard said, and shook the lid a bit harder.

  Harry’s suckers on his feet were equal to the task.

  ‘Please, for the love of god, won’t you just bugger off!’

  And, as Richard said this, he flicked the lid as though he were shaking a sheet out, the lizard popped into the air—got caught by a gust of wind—and sailed off and over the edge of the cliff.

  Richard watched the little green creature disappear from view.

  ‘No!’

  Richard was up and running, but he already knew it was too late as he threw himself to the ground just short of the cliff’s edge. And, as he looked over at the vertiginous drop to the sea hundreds of feet below, Richard now knew what it felt like to be a murderer. He’d just killed a blameless lizard! And remorse filled his body.

  Harry the Lizard emerged from a nearby clump of grass and scampered up Richard’s arm and onto his head. Richard froze as he realised that Harry hadn’t gone over the cliff edge as he’d first thought—and as he spun over to swat the lying and cheating creature away, Harry scampered down Richard’s suit jacket and disappeared off into the long grass, his tail swishing happily behind him.

  ‘Always have to have the last word, don’t you?’ Richard shouted out at his lizard’s departing back.

  Richard got back to his feet, dusted himself down, grabbed up the biscuit tin lid and returned to the jeep, and only then did it dawn on him. He’d done it.

  He’d finally got rid of his lizard.

  Richard was still feeling full of pep as he strode confidently into the office, firing out, ‘So have we found Ben Jenkins yet?’ as he went straight to the board.

  Fidel and Camille looked up from their desks.

  ‘And a good morning to you, too, sir,’ Camille offered.

  When Richard didn’t say anything more, Fidel realised he hadn’t answered the question he’d been asked.

  ‘Not yet, sir,’ he said. ‘But Dwayne’s still out spreading the word.’

  ‘Then tell me, have we been able to find out any more about him—or why he might have gone on the run?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. And I’m checking both in Portugal and the UK. As far as I can tell, since leaving prison, Ben Jenkins hasn’t even got so much as a parking ticket.’

  Richard shot back, ‘Then what about the labs on Guadeloupe? Have they worked out if there was any handwriting on the burnt pieces of paper you sent them?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. They’ve not been in touch,’ Fidel said.

  ‘Then get on the phone to them at once! I want that lab test given top priority and carried out asap.’

  Fidel sighed to himself as he picked up his phone to make the call. Richard was impossible at the best of times, but when he started snapping out orders, he could be insufferable. But Fidel also knew that Richard’s ‘get up and go’ moods tended to get up and leave him after a while. They just had to be ridden out like a tropical storm.

  Richard turned his attention back to the board. What had they got so far? What were they missing? Who was their killer?

  The Murder

  Five guests go for a swim

  Paul hands out robes

  Aslan prepares the tea

  5 guests + Aslan go into Meditation

  Space

  Aslan locks it down from inside

  Drink tea—all cups turned over

  10-15 minute window for murder,

  (8.00-8.10/8.15)

  Right-handed killer!

  Investigation / Leads

  WHY KILLED IN PAPER HOUSE?

  3 x drawing pins in the Meditation Space. Used to pin the murder weapon to a pillar. No prints on any of them Tea drugged with GHB, a sedative Who was in Aslan’s study the night before @6pm shouting ‘You’re not going to get away with it’?

  WHERE’S THE NOTEBOOK

  OF NAMES FOR THE SUNRISE HEALING?

  Is it the burnt paper in the furnace in the cellar?


  Outside the Meditation Space

  Rianka Kennedy

  Wife

  Has no idea who’d want Aslan dead

  Married to Aslan when he was

  David—but left him when he was convicted

  Took Aslan back 15 yrs ago when he came to the island Dominic De Vere

  Ex-hypnotherapist. Now handyman

  Sacked by Aslan

  Argued with Aslan

  Caught returning to Scene of Crime

  Has drugs lab in his house—could have manufactured GHB

  Inside the Meditation Space

  Aslan Kennedy

  Victim

  Everyone says he’s nice

  Real name is David Kennedy

  Ex-conman—ran art-lease Ponzi

  scheme, stole £2m

  Went to prison 20 years ago, served

  5 yrs Julia Higgins

  Worked at The Retreat last 6 months Confessed to murder—but Xyrax in blood—and lack of real motive—and LEFT-HANDED … she’s innocent

  Ann Sellars

  Housewife

  Married to Paul

  Arrived on island 7 days before murder

  Lost £20k in Ponzi scheme

  Her fingerprints are on the murder weapon—but she washed knife the night before

  Had her dreams as a singer ruined when she lost £20k

  Clearly hates her husband, Paul

  Says she didn’t recognise Aslan / David Paul Sellars

  Arrived on island 7 days before murder

  Handed out the white robes

  Pharmacist—who stole Xyrax from work

  KNEW ASLAN’S REAL IDENTITY

  Wife Ann lost money in Ponzi scheme

  Hates his wife, Ann

  Wife NO LONGER alibis him for argument at 6pm

  Saskia Filbee

  Single, 45 yrs old

  Here on her own. Says she arrived night before

  Heard argument in office night before—at about 6pm—a man, but couldn’t identify him

  Lied that she’d lost £50k in Ponzi scheme—she lost £500,000

  Says she didn’t recognise Aslan / David, but she was his friend …! Maybe she did Ben Jenkins

  Property Developer. Portugal.

  Arrived on island 4 days before murder

  No alibi for time of argument at 6pm