Camille went into the en suite bathroom and saw that it was just as smart as the rest of the bedroom. There was a brand new walk-in shower, and clean mirrors sparkling above the white porcelain sink. Camille opened a medicine cabinet and saw only neat piles of vitamins. And still no evidence of drugs use.
‘And I can’t find any evidence of Polly still using drugs. Can you?’ Camille asked her boss as she returned to the bedroom.
But Richard was nowhere to be seen.
‘Sir?’
‘Hold on,’ she heard Richard say from the floor just beyond the bed.
Camille went round to see that Richard was on his hands and knees and had pulled up the corner of the cream carpet.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Following a lead,’ Richard said, indicating a thin electric cable that was running under the carpet.
‘What I mean,’ he then said, knowing that he hadn’t been entirely clear, ‘is that I’m following a lead both figuratively and literally.’
‘I understood you the first time,’ Camille said, joining her boss on the carpet. ‘You’ve got a cable.’
Richard indicated the thin white electric cable.
‘You see, when I looked behind the chest of drawers, I saw a plug in a socket, with the cable running down to the carpet.’
‘So you’re now pulling up the carpet?’ Camille asked, surprised.
‘Of course. The only electrical device in the whole room is the lamp on the bedside table, and, as I’m sure you’ve already noticed, it’s plugged in by the wall just underneath it.’
Camille looked over and saw that what Richard had said was true. There was only one electrical device in the room—which was clearly plugged in—so what was the cable under the carpet powering?
With a loud rip, Richard pulled up another half foot of carpet up in between the wall and the bed and saw that the little electric cable was still heading towards the bed. However, it was now near enough that Richard could pull on the cable alone, and it ripped up through the gap between the carpet and the wall.
The cable went up the back leg of the bed and seemed to go into the underside of the bedframe.
‘Hold on, I’ll get this,’ Richard said.
Richard lay down, so he could gain access to the underside of the bed. The clearance was only a foot or so, but it was just enough for him to slip underneath.
Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, Richard followed the cable up and saw that it went into a grey plastic box no bigger than a pack of cards that had been gaffer-taped to the underside of the bed. But the grey box had a pattern of what looked like dozens of air holes on its underside and a tiny green LED light on its side.
It was a surveillance bug.
Someone was listening in to everything that went on in Polly’s bedroom.
Chapter 6
At the same time that Richard and Camille were finding the surveillance bug under Polly’s bed, Fidel was in his running gear jogging around the byways of the island trying to follow the route Juliette had taken on the morning of the murder. It was hot and exhausting work if only because Fidel—diligent as ever—felt he had to stop and ask everyone he could find if they remembered seeing Juliette out on her run the previous Sunday morning. So far, over an hour into his task, he’d barely covered a tenth of the distance and he hadn’t found a single person who’d seen Juliette. It didn’t mean she hadn’t been on her run, of course, but Fidel already found it interesting that he couldn’t find anyone who remembered seeing her.
As for Dwayne, he’d had a much more pleasant morning strolling the cliff path from Polly’s house down to the outskirts of Honoré. After all, although Richard had asked him to run a fingertip search of the route the killer might have taken, Dwayne figured that his boss couldn’t have been talking literally, so he’d just kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. And so far—luckily for him—he’d not been able to find anything out of the ordinary.
Dwayne was therefore in a relaxed mood as he strolled back into Honoré along the beach. It was at times like this that Dwayne found himself overwhelmed by the love he felt for the island. He knew dimly that there was a wider world out there of riches, fast living and fame, but somehow he felt that everyone who strived so hard to better themselves in their lives were somehow missing the point of life, which could never be about money or fame. No, Dwayne mused to himself, life was about knowing who you were, where you were from, and then being comfortable with that. It’s why he had some sympathy for Richard’s constant confusion and fury. After all, Richard had been ripped from his home where he knew who was who and what was what and been relocated somewhere where he’d had to start all over again.
Dwayne paused a moment, and grunted a laugh to himself. He had some sympathy for his boss, but he shouldn’t get too carried away.
It was in this spirit of goodwill, then, that Dwayne saw Richard’s mother standing on the jetty of the harbour looking at the boats.
‘Hey, Jennifer, how’s it going?’ Dwayne called out, if only because it amused him that he now knew that Richard’s mother’s name was Jennifer.
Jennifer looked over and waved, and Dwayne soon found himself sauntering over for a chat.
‘So how’s your day been so far?’ Dwayne asked.
Jennifer was enthusiastic as she explained how she’d had a coffee in a beachside bar, and had even been brave enough to try one of the local delicacies, something called a currants roll.
‘You had a currants roll?’ Dwayne said, impressed. As far as he was concerned, the mixture of currants, pastry and cinnamon in a currants roll was the holy trinity of all known flavours.
‘And you know what?’ Jennifer said, clearly very proud with herself. ‘I even liked it.’
‘Of course you liked it!’ Dwayne laughed—and he and Jennifer were soon swapping recipes of favourite pastry dishes, with Jennifer simply fascinated by the culinary links they were able to make between the Jamaican pattie and the Cornish pasty, and Dwayne in particular being taken by Jennifer’s rhapsodic description of a traditional English plum duff.
In fact, Dwayne and Jennifer were having such a good time that it seemed only natural, now that Dwayne had finished with his boss’s immediate task of checking the coastal path, he’d offer to show Jennifer some of the island’s sights—although, when Dwayne suggested this to Jennifer, she briefly froze in panic. After all, she was still concerned about the possibility of catching any or all of dengue fever, malaria, chikungunya, rabies, typhoid, yellow fever, and hepatitis A and/or B. But Dwayne’s smile was so delightful, Jennifer noticed—and he looked so charming in his police uniform—how could she possibly resist?
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’d be delighted to accompany you. Thank you.’
Back at Polly’s house, it didn’t take long for Richard to cut the surveillance bug from its cable using his little pearl-handled pocket knife. Getting his body back out from under the bed proved more of a challenge, but once Richard was finally standing up, he handed Camille the surveillance bug to put in an evidence bag.
‘We need to dust it for fingerprints,’ he said.
‘I think we might be able to do better than that,’ Camille said, pulling a large Swiss Army Knife out of her handbag. As she flicked past the array of tools—the magnifying glass, the saw and the hook for carrying parcels of newspaper—Richard couldn’t help but make comparisons.
‘I didn’t know you had such a big penknife,’ he said, holding up his own tiny pocket knife.
Camille looked at her boss and laughed.
‘It’s not how big it is, sir, it’s how you use it.’
Richard blushed bright red, which—seeing as he was already bright red from his exertions under the bed—wasn’t actually noticeable to Camille as she flicked out a Phillips screwdriver and started on the tiny screws on the surveillance bug.
‘I just think,’ Richard huffed, ‘that seeing as you’ve been carrying such a useful tool about your pers
on all this time, you might have mentioned it before now.’
‘I might have done,’ Camille said in agreement. ‘Hold on to this, would you?’ she said as she popped the back off the device to reveal its electronic innards. ‘I want to know, how does the bug broadcast its recordings?’
Using the tip of the screwdriver, she reached into the tiny machine and flicked out the little SIM card that was inside.
‘Now that’s interesting. If there’s a SIM card, then that means someone phones in to get the recordings—or the device phones out—but, either way, this SIM card will be registered to someone’s credit card. If we get onto the phone company, they should be able to tell us who owns this.’
Richard looked at Camille, impressed despite himself.
‘You can do that, can you?’
There was a knock at the door and Sophie stuck her head into the room.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but Claire’s ready for you. She’s in the study downstairs.’
‘Very good,’ Richard said. ‘Thanks for letting us know.’
Having instructed Camille to stay behind to contact the phone company, Richard went downstairs to interview Claire on his own.
As he entered the study, he saw Claire was sitting in her wheelchair by the window, her dark hair still wet from her bath, the elegant scoop of her neck and chin in profile to Richard as she looked out at the view outside.
Richard briefly stopped in the doorway. In profile, he could see that Claire resembled her sister far more than she’d ever know. And yet one of them had become a supermodel famous the world over, and the other had never done any modelling work in her life. Richard briefly wondered how that could be, but, looking at Claire, he realised that, irrespective of what Phil had told him about how she hated her sister, his sympathies were naturally tilted in Claire’s favour. After all, being first-born must have been a burden to her as well. It had always been her duty to grow up and run the family estate. What was more, Richard found himself musing, although he had no siblings himself, he could well imagine that if he did have any, he’d find them deeply irritating. Just as Claire had found Polly irritating.
‘There’s something I should tell you,’ Claire said without turning around. ‘Something about me and my sister.’ Only then did Claire turn and look at Richard. She then pushed her chair towards him—or, at least, she tried to. Richard could see that the little front wheel on the left hand side of her chair seemed to be briefly stuck in position. But then, with a final squeak of protest, it freed itself, started turning normally, and Claire was able to wheel over to him.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘You spend a fortune on these chairs, and sometimes they’re no better than bloody supermarket trolleys.’
Richard smiled despite himself. ‘You were saying?’
‘Only that you should perhaps know, it was Polly who put me in this wheelchair.’
Richard decided to play the innocent. ‘It was?’
‘You see,’ she continued with sadness in her heart, ‘my sister was always different. It was like she was missing the part of her brain that ever thought of consequences.’
And so Claire told the story of the Boxing Day hunt, and Richard noted that it broadly tallied with Phil’s version of events, but with one glaring exception. Claire claimed that she’d forgiven her sister for causing her accident.
‘You have?’ Richard asked, surprised.
Claire looked back at Richard. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It took me a few years, but, yes, I’ve forgiven her. I had no choice.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘When it first happened, I spent six months in hospital, and that was the toughest thing I’ve had to endure in my life. Because you don’t know pain until you’re feeling it everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. It gets to the point when you don’t remember what it’s like not to live with pain. You’d accept any compromise, any disability, just for the pain to stop.’
Claire lapsed into silence, and then sighed deeply. It was clear to Richard that even remembering that time in her life was still upsetting for her.
‘And when I came out of hospital, I was driven by a rage,’ Claire said in a small voice. ‘I was still very weak, but it was like this hot fire inside me. This anger at what Polly had done to me. But Polly didn’t come back to the UK for years after she’d injured me—she’d run away if you ask me—and I realised, I was using up all this energy keeping this fire of hate alive, but what was it actually achieving? So, after a couple of years, I decided: enough. I got Polly to visit me in Lincolnshire. It was the first time we’d met in person since she’d injured me. I told her I forgave her and we both wept like kids. But if it meant I’d turned a corner, I don’t think my forgiveness helped Polly. And I don’t think she was in a happy place ever again. I always thought it was why she took heroin. She could forget her life—and who she was—when she was blotto.’
‘You knew she was taking drugs?’
‘I knew she was a heroin addict, yes. But that was the thing about Polly. She always fell in with the wrong crowd and allowed others to influence her. Whenever I challenged her about her addiction, she just tried to justify it by saying she never injected, she only ever smoked it. It wasn’t the same as being a real heroin addict. That’s what she believed.
‘But yes. Within a few years of my accident, I decided that either I could continue to blame my absent sister for what she’d done to me, or I could accept it and just get on with my life. And I was lucky. I’d inherited the family estate after Father died, I had a lot on my plate, so I decided to keep myself busy. And it worked. I found I was thinking more about the future than I was about the past. More about what I could do rather than what I couldn’t.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ Richard asked, ‘if you inherited the family estate, what did Polly inherit?’
Claire had the good grace to look embarrassed. ‘Nothing. Unfortunately, Father never forgave her for injuring me, and cut her out of his will.’
‘That must have been tough on her,’ Richard said.
‘It was. Because this is what I began to realise as time passed. I’d got on with my life, and Polly was just doing the same things over and over again. Behaving the same way. Being irresponsible. And I think she’d also begun to notice that she was getting older. She couldn’t get by on as little sleep as she used to, she couldn’t do photoshoots wasted on drugs. And she wasn’t as pretty as she used to be, if that’s not a mean thing to say. In the end, I realised I felt sorry for her.’
‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘Although, you know, Phil Adams told us you hated Polly.’
‘Him?’ Claire said haughtily. ‘He’s a parasite, that man. A hanger-on. It’s people like him who destroyed my sister by getting her into drugs in the first place.’
‘He got your sister into drugs?’
‘I don’t know about that, but I know he and Polly spent most of the nineties together stoned. And if he says I hated Polly, what does he know? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still argued with Polly and found her infuriating as hell—still just as self-absorbed—but I couldn’t possibly hate her. Since Mother died, she’s all the family I’ve got left.’
Richard could see the sincerity shine from Claire’s eyes. But he still didn’t quite buy it.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t understand. Because what I’m seeing here is two sisters. One inherits everything. The other gets nothing. And the one who inherited everything was almost killed by the one who didn’t.’
Claire sighed, understanding Richard’s scepticism, but he still wasn’t finished.
‘And to make matters worse, their father died soon after the accident, cutting the younger twin out of the will entirely.’
‘I know,’ Claire said, shifting her weight in her wheelchair. ‘But Father’s death was in no way linked to my accident. He suffered a heart attack while out shooting pheasants. But I agree. Polly was hurt badly when Father cut her out of his will. But if you r
eally want to know, it was how Mother treated her after Father’s death that really upset her.’
‘And how did your mother treat her?’
‘Mother never forgave Polly for injuring me. And, the thing is, Mother could be as pig-headed as Polly. So she stayed in Lincolnshire refusing to communicate with Polly while Polly travelled the world refusing to communicate with Mother.
‘When Mother died at the beginning of August last year, they still hadn’t reconciled, and when Polly came to the funeral, I could see that Mother’s death had hit her hard. So when Polly returned to Saint-Marie, I came out here to make sure she was okay. And I have to say, she was in a bad way when I got here. She was stoned on heroin from morning until night. And I kept telling her she couldn’t change the past but she could change the future. She had to get herself into rehab. And then, after a few weeks of being here, something happened that made me think I’d never be able to save her.’
Claire took a deep breath before continuing, and Richard realised that she was preparing herself for the final ascent.
‘You see, I don’t do drugs. I’ve always felt it was disgusting that anyone would pollute their body. Especially since my injury. However, Polly insisted I have some marijuana with her one night. She kept insisting, holding this spliff out to me, and, in the end, I took it. I wasn’t going to smoke it, I was going to stub it out, but I saw this look in Polly’s eyes once it was in my hands. It was a look that was as cold as ice. And then, when I told her that I’d never put any kind of drug in my body, she started to get angry with me. In the end, I ripped the spliff open so that it would be ruined, and that’s when I discovered that although it contained a small amount of marijuana, a whole heap of brown powder came out of the spliff as well.’
Killing Of Polly Carter Page 10