‘Exactly, sir,’ Fidel said.
Richard considered what Fidel had just told him, and then decided it was time to get on.
‘So, Polly Carter!’ he said, indicating the notes Camille had written up on the whiteboard. ‘A world-famous super-model is at home with her sister, Claire Carter; Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel; her manager, Max Brandon; her friend and film director, Phil Adams. Oh, and her live-in home help Juliette and Alain Moreau are also in the picture, although they say they were both elsewhere at the time of the murder.’
‘Assuming they’re telling the truth,’ Camille pointed out.
‘Indeed. Anyway, we know that Polly was a tricky woman to work for—according to Juliette, her home help. Although she could also be generous, according to her husband, Alain.’
‘And she could be hyper one minute and depressed the next,’ Camille added. ‘According to Max, her agent.’
‘And way too trusting, according to her good friend, Phil.’
‘She just sounds like your typical self-centred celebrity,’ Dwayne summed up for them all.
Richard looked at Dwayne in mock surprise. ‘You know about the world of celebrities, do you, Dwayne?’
‘I know it’s not healthy,’ Dwayne said. ‘And if Polly’s been famous since her early twenties, she’s going to have a pretty warped view of the world, I can tell you that much, Chief.’
‘Very well. So that’s our victim. And this morning, she went for a walk with her sister, Claire.’
‘Even though this was the first time she’d been out for a walk with her sister on her own,’ Camille offered.
‘Quite so,’ Richard agreed. ‘And, according to Claire, once they were in the garden, Polly started losing her temper with her. And then—again, according to Claire—Polly took Claire to the top of the cliffs and threatened to kill herself before then going down some of the steps and throwing herself to her death. However, the wooden branch we later found covered in blood at the scene suggests that that’s not quite what happened. In fact, what the branch suggests is that someone was already waiting on the steps before Polly had arrived.’
‘The man in the yellow raincoat,’ Dwayne offered.
‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘But whoever this person was, they attacked Polly with the branch, knocked her to her death, and then hid the branch before making their escape. Somehow. But the point is, we already know from the anonymous letters that there’s already one person out there who wanted Polly Carter dead, so I want background checks run on Polly Carter and everyone who was up at the house. Who benefits from her murder? Who’d want her dead? I also want us chasing the autopsy on her body. If she was attacked by someone wielding that branch, I bet there’ll be further evidence on her body.’
‘And there are your questions from earlier,’ Fidel offered.
‘Indeed, but I think I’ve got a slightly different set of four questions now,’ Richard said, turning back to the board and writing up a list in his neat handwriting.
Once he’d done so, he stepped away from the board so his team could see what he’d written.
The Key Questions
1. How did the killer know to be on the cliff at that precise moment?
2. How did the killer vanish into thin air afterwards?
3. Why was Claire’s mobile phone found in a chandelier?
4. Who sent the anonymous letters?
‘And you know what?’ Richard said, putting the lid back on his whiteboard marker with a satisfying pop. ‘I think that if we can answer those four questions, we’ll stand a good chance of identifying who killed Polly Carter, knowing just why she had to die, and—above all else—just how the killer escaped afterwards without being seen. Now then, team, let’s get to work.’
Chapter 4
The following day, Richard was sitting at his desk trying to focus on work, but his mind kept drifting back to the dinner he’d had with his mother the night before. It’s not that she’d been difficult in any way—if anything, she’d wanted only to talk about Richard’s life on the island—but, as an experienced copper, Richard got the impression that his mother was being evasive somehow. There’d been a reserve in her eyes he couldn’t place. And Richard’s disquiet was stirred further by the way his mother seemed to deflect any questions he asked about his father. ‘Oh you know what he’s like,’ she’d just said brightly, without any real meaning to her words at all.
But perhaps most unsettling of all, Richard had discovered that his mother didn’t have any set plans for her visit, and he’d never known her travel anywhere without detailed notes and pre-planned itineraries. Instead, she told him that there was a lovely boy she’d met on reception called Karl who was putting together an itinerary for her, starting with a tour of a local rum distillery the following morning.
In short, the whole evening had been quite peculiar for Richard, and as he’d pecked his mother on each cheek to bid her goodnight, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been ‘played’ somehow.
However, Richard knew he was supposed to be researching Polly’s life before her death—not thinking about his mother—so he made himself look at the news article he’d got up on the computer monitor. And then he realised what the article said.
‘Good grief!’ he said in amazement.
Camille sighed heavily. ‘What is it this time?’
Richard indicated the webpage on his screen. ‘It says here that, back in 2005, Polly attended an orgy in Cheam.’
‘I told you, sir, they’ll print anything,’ Camille said, not even remotely for the first time.
‘But how do they know?’ Richard asked in awe. ‘Do you think a reporter was actually there?’
There was a warm chuckle from behind Dwayne’s monitor. And then his face appeared, his eyes sparkling. ‘You’d be surprised, Chief.’
‘I certainly would be surprised if I found myself at an orgy in Cheam.’
Richard made a note of this latest impossible-to-believe fact on his ever-expanding list of lies, truths, half-truths and PR puff he’d so far been able to uncover about Polly. He’d learnt that she’d at one time been the highest paid model in the world; that she was patron of a hedgehog sanctuary in Cornwall; that she was a well-known heroin addict who’d spent her life battling addiction; that she’d designed a range of clothes for toddlers; that there was still an active warrant for her arrest in Portugal for assaulting a press photographer; that she’d done the Duke of Edinburgh Outward Bound courses as a teenager and had a Gold Medal; and that she’d dated a famous rock star for many years, even though, as far as Richard could tell, the man in question didn’t look so much like a rock star as a bin man.
The only useful facts Richard had so far been able to glean from the internet were that the previous September Polly had suffered a massive drugs overdose and nearly died. She’d been rushed to hospital, had her stomach pumped and had a blood transfusion, and had only just survived. There were photos all over the web that Richard had been able to find of a stick-thin Polly leaving the hospital on Saint-Marie wearing dark shades and using a walking stick twelve days after she was admitted.
But if she’d nearly died from a drugs overdose in September, he’d also discovered that, after Christmas, just as the witnesses had said in the first interviews, she’d checked herself into a rehab clinic just outside Los Angeles and had spent ten weeks there. Richard knew all this because he’d found a press release online that had been issued by Polly’s manager Max back in March when Polly had got out. In his statement, Max said that Polly had finally won her lifelong battle with addiction and was now eager to return to her work as one of the most in-demand models in the world.
Richard realised that his thoughts kept slipping back to what an orgy in Cheam would look like, so, before he got too confused, he jumped out of his chair and clapped his hands together in a way—far too late—he realised, probably made him look like a newly qualified Geography teacher.
‘Right, then, team,’ he said. ‘What have
we got so far?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, picking up his notes eager to report to his boss. ‘I’ve been looking into Phil Adams, and he’s from quite an impressive family. Before he retired, his dad was a teacher at Eton College, and his mum is a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office. As for siblings, he’s got an older brother and a younger sister. The brother’s a banker who owns his own hedge fund company—so he’s worth a fair bit—and his sister’s the British Ambassador to Slovenia.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, unable to stop himself from being impressed. Phil came from a super-successful family.
‘As for Mr Adams himself,’ Fidel continued, ‘he made his name with a string of violent gangster films back in the 1990s, but he’s not made much since then. And the main thing I’ve been able to dig up about him is, he was also in rehab in Los Angeles earlier this year.’
‘He was?’ Richard asked, thrown. ‘Was everyone in Polly’s house in rehab?’
‘No, sir, just Phil Adams and Polly Carter as far as I can tell. But I don’t know what clinic he was booked into, or why he was booked into it. It was just a few references in the gossip columns of a couple of UK newspapers. That following the failure of his latest feature film last year, he’d booked himself into rehab.’
‘So his last film wasn’t successful?’ Richard asked.
‘Apparently not,’ Fidel said.
‘Interesting. Good work, Fidel. Then what about you, Dwayne? What have you got?’
‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, ‘I’ve not been able to get much on Max Brandon. But he was a top agent at a talent agency in London back in the day. He then decided to go it alone when he took on Polly, and she’s been his only client since then. And it’s no surprise he doesn’t represent anyone else. Looking after her career is a full-time job. He spends most of his time trying to stop the press from running stories about her latest sex scandal or drugs bust. It’s even rumoured he tells her who she has to go out with to promote her career. But the thing is, Chief, because Polly’s his only client, Max is unlikely to be our killer. With her dead, he’s now lost his one source of income.’
‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘Good point.’
‘But things get more tasty when we look at Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel.’
‘They do?’
‘Sure do,’ Dwayne said. ‘I rang the agency Sophie works for back in the UK. And it turns out she stopped working for them a few months back. But when Claire wanted a nurse to accompany her to Saint-Marie, she asked for Sophie by name because—get this—it turns out Claire came to Saint-Marie last year just before her sister Polly had her massive overdose—and Sophie came with her last time as well.’
‘Really?’ Richard said. ‘And how long was Claire here for last year?’
‘According to Sophie’s agency, it was a five week booking starting at the beginning of last August.’
‘So,’ Richard said, working through the timings, ‘Claire and Sophie were here last year for five weeks just before Polly took an overdose that nearly killed her … and they were both here again this year, and this time Polly did die.’
‘Got it in one, Chief!’ Dwayne said, leaning back in his chair, satisfied.
‘Then good work, Dwayne. We need to look into that. Why did Claire come out here last year? And was it connected in any way with Polly’s overdose?’
Richard turned to Camille. ‘What about you, Camille? How are you getting on with Alain and Juliette Moreau?’ Camille looked at Richard and then shrugged as if to say she had no idea, which was a physical tic that Richard always found puzzling in his subordinate. After all, the stereotype of a French person was that they shrugged the whole time, so—he thought to himself, as he stood sweltering in the midday heat wearing polished brogues, a woollen suit and old school tie—why would she be so foolish as to conform to the national stereotype?
‘Well, sir,’ Camille said, and this was another thing about Camille that got under Richard’s skin: she never called him ‘Chief’ like Dwayne did. Or Fidel did. Or Catherine, for that matter. And now that Richard was thinking about it, even Selwyn Patterson, the island’s Commissioner of Police, would sometimes call him ‘Chief’—even if only ironically. So if all these people were prepared to give him the affectionate soubriquet of ‘Chief’, then why couldn’t Camille call him ‘Chief’? Even once? Frankly, it rankled.
‘Are you even listening to me, sir?’ Camille asked as she shifted her weight onto a hip. Richard realised too late that he hadn’t been.
‘Sorry. Yes. Of course. Go on.’
‘Only, there’s next to nothing on Juliette or Alain—although Alain is Juliette’s third husband. She married her first husband when she was nineteen years old. It lasted two years. She then married her next husband—a Frenchman over here on holiday—when she was twenty-nine. And this time the marriage lasted four years before he left her and returned to France. As for Alain, he and Juliette got married seven years ago—just before they took the job at the house.’
‘I see. Interesting. Thank you, Camille.’
‘And sir,’ Fidel chipped in. ‘I know Alain and Juliette a bit. We go to the same church.’
‘You do?’ Richard said.
‘Although Juliette doesn’t attend as often as Alain.’
‘Then what would you say they were like?’
‘Oh they’re nice enough, I suppose,’ Fidel said. ‘Especially him. He’s one of those people who’s quietly impressive, if you ask me. You don’t really notice him, and then you realise he’s the guy who’s helping out with Sunday school every weekend. Or taking food to some of the older people on the island who are living on their own.’
‘He visits old people?’
‘He does, sir.’
Richard thought for a moment.
‘Yes. Doing Meals on Wheels isn’t exactly the M.O. of your typical killer, is it?’
‘That’s my thinking, sir.’
‘And as for his wife, Juliette?’
Fidel looked briefly uncomfortable. ‘Well, sir, I don’t know her so well, so I wouldn’t like to say.’
Richard exhaled in exasperation.
‘Fidel,’ he said, ‘this is a murder inquiry. If you know anything negative about any of our suspects, that’s very much the territory I want you to be in.’
‘Well, sir, it’s not that I know anything about Juliette that’s definitely negative, it’s just that I don’t think I much like her. You know? She doesn’t come to church that often, and she isn’t that nice when she does. She’s one of those people who seems hard, if you ask me. Hard and cold.’
‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘And she seemed particularly unmoved when she found out about Polly’s death. So we’ve got a tough woman who’s on her third husband who’s married to a softie? Is that what we’re saying?’
‘That seems to be about it, sir,’ Fidel agreed.
‘Then tell me, Fidel, seeing as Alain said he was at church last Sunday when Polly was killed, you don’t happen to remember seeing him there, do you?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t at church last Sunday. But I can ask around. See who remembers seeing him.’
‘Thank you. Please do.’
‘Oh,’ Camille said, ‘and I’ve also spoken to my mother and she’s confirmed that Juliette and Alain were at her bar having a coffee at about 10.30am on the morning of the murder. So that’s their alibi.’
‘And yet,’ Richard said, ‘is it that much of an alibi? Because even if Juliette and Alain were having coffee at your mother’s bar by 10.30, it’s still possible that one of them was committing murder back at the cliffs at 10am. Isn’t it?’
As Richard said this, he turned to look at the notes he and Camille had been able to write up on the office whiteboard, and once again he found himself with an almost physical yearning to be back in the UK. Back in the UK there were climate-controlled incident rooms; here, the climate was controlled only in the sense that it was always boiling hot. Back in the UK they had AV suites and
wall-mounted touchscreens; here they had an old whiteboard with three bent legs. And there, they had access to a nationwide network of thousands of Law Enforcement officers; whereas on Saint-Marie, Richard always felt that it was just the four of them solving each case on their own. This was mainly because it was just four of them solving each case on their own.
Richard sighed, and made himself look at the meagre facts they’d been able to collect on the whiteboard.
Polly Carter. The victim. A model. One-time heroin addict. Said she’d commit suicide just before she was murdered.
Claire Carter. The twin sister. In a wheelchair. Last to see the deceased alive.
Sophie Wessel. Claire’s nurse. Didn’t see the moment of death, only heard it, but was second to the scene.
Max Brandon. Polly’s agent. Sophie saw him go upstairs before the murder and Claire saw him in the house afterwards as well. At an upstairs window at the time of death?
Phil Adams. Film director. At an upstairs window at time of death?
Juliette Moreau. Was on a 10k run at the time?
Alain Moreau. Was at church at the time?
And, as Richard considered the names, he realised that there was one more name he needed to add at the bottom.
The Man in Yellow?? Was seen going down the cliff steps by Claire just before the murder …?
‘Okay, team,’ Richard said. ‘Whether or not there was a man in a yellow raincoat on the cliff steps before Polly Carter was killed, clearly there was someone waiting there. So who of our witnesses might it have been?’
Camille joined Richard at the whiteboard.
‘Well, sir,’ she said. ‘It can’t have been Claire. If she’s the person who saw the man in yellow.’
‘Agreed,’ Richard said.
‘And Sophie was in the garden at the time,’ Dwayne said, joining Richard and Camille at the board.
‘Indeed. So she couldn’t have also been on the cliff steps at the same time.’
Killing Of Polly Carter Page 7