Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  There was the briefest of pauses, and then Juliette looked surprised.

  ‘What threatening letters?’ she asked.

  ‘We found anonymous letters in a locked drawer in Polly’s study. Threatening her. Was it you who sent them?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Juliette said with a hint of challenge in her voice. ‘And why would I threaten Polly Carter?’

  ‘Because she had an affair with your husband,’ Richard said.

  Juliette snorted. ‘How on earth could I have threatened her? She was a single woman. And a narcissist. She’d have laughed in my face if I’d tried to tell her what she’d done was wrong. And do you think I’d still be in this job if I’d ever confronted her? So, the fact that I’m still here—all these months later—should prove to you that Polly never had any kind of issues with me. And as for my issues with her, I made sure I shared them only with my husband.’

  As Juliette said this, she crossed her arms as though to say that that was all there was to say on the matter. And, on reflection, Richard couldn’t help but conclude that she was possibly right.

  Back at the police station, Camille got the sound files from the thumb drive and copied them onto her main computer. Turning the volume up as loud as possible, she played the first file. Initially, it was hard to tell what was going on as all they could hear was a chorus of crickets in the background.

  ‘It must be night-time,’ Richard said.

  Camille looked at her boss, surprised.

  ‘It’s when male crickets rub their legs together to attract a mate.’

  ‘You have been reading your book on insects.’

  Once again, Richard felt hurt by Camille’s tone. Why did it matter to her what he did in his spare time? And what was wrong with his interest in entomology anyway? It was a perfectly valid hobby.

  Before Camille could say anything more on the subject, they heard voices speaking from the computer’s speakers. The sound was muffled, but it was definitely possible to hear a man—it sounded like Alain—say ‘We can’t do this’. A woman then replied, ‘But that’s why we have to do this!’

  So this was Polly Carter, Richard realised. He and Camille stood in silence as they heard Polly flirtily beg Alain to come to bed with her—goading him on, saying she wanted him, she needed him, and that he was irresistible. Next, Richard and Camille heard Alain beg Polly to put her top back on, that he was married, and that he had to stay faithful to his wife. Polly just laughed, telling Alain that Juliette was off on one of her stupid training runs, it’s all she seemed to care about. And then, with a ‘Dear God, woman!’, there was the sudden sound of bed springs stretching violently—Richard could but presume, because Alain’s resistance had finally crumbled and he and Polly had fallen onto the bed together.

  Yes, Richard thought to himself, as the sound of the background crickets was finally obliterated by the steady groan of bed springs rhythmically bouncing, Polly and Alain were clearly on the bed now.

  And it was only then that Richard realised that he was standing next to Camille while they both listened to an audio recording of two people having sex.

  ‘Chief?!’

  Richard whipped his head around and saw Dwayne standing in the doorway. But worse than that, his mother was standing at Dwayne’s side.

  No one spoke while the sound of rhythmic bouncing filled the room, and then, after a few more moments of shocked silence from Dwayne and Jennifer, Camille threw her head back and laughed raucously while Richard said, ‘Dear God, Camille, stop that racket!’ as he dived for the mouse on her computer and desperately started clicking at the sound file until he’d managed to silence it.

  ‘What on earth have you two been listening to?’ Jennifer asked in wonder.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Richard said, now covering up his embarrassment—as he often did—with rudeness.

  ‘Oh don’t worry,’ Jennifer said. ‘I just wanted you to know, I’ve had a lovely afternoon with Dwayne here, but I won’t be around for dinner tonight. Dwayne’s booked me in on a night-time trip to see the hatching turtles.’

  Richard looked at his mother. And then he looked at the beaming Dwayne as he stood at her side.

  ‘You’ve—um—spent the afternoon together?’

  ‘That’s right, Chief,’ Dwayne said, still grinning. ‘We went to the Botanical Gardens. And it turns out your mother knows pretty much all there is to know about flowers.’

  ‘Thank you, Dwayne,’ Jennifer said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘And as for police work?’ Richard asked sardonically.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dwayne said, still beaming. ‘All done.’

  ‘And don’t worry about me,’ Jennifer said. ‘I’m off to Catherine’s bar now. According to Dwayne, I haven’t visited the island until I’ve met Catherine and tried a glass of the local rum.’

  ‘You’re right there, Jennifer!’ Dwayne said, happily.

  Jennifer once again thanked Dwayne for her lovely afternoon and left with a smile, which finally allowed Richard to ask Dwayne what clues he’d been able to find on the old smugglers’ path. But, even as Dwayne told his boss that he’d unfortunately been unable to find any substantive clues or leads at all, Richard found it hard to concentrate on what he was being told.

  His mother had spent the afternoon with Dwayne and was now drinking rum on her own in Catherine’s bar? Richard hadn’t really known his mother drink much beyond the odd glass of sherry on Christmas morning. Since when did she drink neat spirits in the middle of the afternoon?

  Something was up with his mother. But what was it?

  Over the next few days, Richard got just as far with his mother as he did with the case, which was to say precisely nowhere.

  For starters, just as Dwayne had found no clues on the old smugglers’ path, Fidel had also been unable to prove conclusively whether Juliette had been on her 10k run at the time of the murder. The only two witnesses he’d been able to find who remembered seeing her at all, saw her just before 10.30am in Honoré while she’d been waiting to meet up with Alain. This would—theoretically—have still given her enough time to kill Polly on the cliff at 10am and be in Honoré in time to be seen at 10.30.

  Fidel also tried to pin down Alain’s alibi by talking to the priest who’d officiated at the Sunday service Alain said he’d been attending at the time of the murder. The priest—who Fidel knew well—said he couldn’t remember seeing Alain, but then, there were so many people who came to Sunday services that there was every chance Alain had been there and he just hadn’t noticed. So, Fidel had started asking around the parishioners he knew had also been at the service, and none of them could remember seeing Alain, either. But seeing as the congregation would have been well over a hundred people and Fidel had so far only spoken to half a dozen of them, he couldn’t yet say for sure whether Alain had been there or not. He was just going to have to keep asking.

  But Fidel’s hard work allowed Richard to write up on the whiteboard that Juliette and Alain still didn’t have definitive alibis for the time of the murder.

  As for the other suspects, Richard and his team didn’t seem to make any more progress.

  Richard spoke to Claire’s GP back in Lincolnshire who was able to confirm that her accident had indeed left her legs paralysed. Under pressure from Richard, the GP then admitted that it was possible—perhaps—for someone with Claire’s injuries to regain limited use in her legs, but he said that it would have been extremely unlikely. What’s more, after so many years of inactivity, even if Claire had regained some movement, she’d have been unlikely to have had the strength to walk. When Richard tried to suggest that maybe Claire was suffering from conversion disorder—as Phil had said Polly believed—the GP had just outright laughed. Very few people had conversion disorder, he explained rather patronisingly, it was entirely unlikely that Claire was one of them.

  As for Sophie, Dwayne had sprinkled what he insisted on calling his ‘love dust’ on his contact
with her agency back in London, and—primed with what Sophie had already admitted to them—he was able to get the rest of the story out of them. Sophie had indeed been sacked after she’d been caught thieving four fifty pound notes from one of their clients. However, it was the first time that Sophie had ever transgressed, and she’d otherwise had glowing feedback from every single client she’d nursed for the previous fifteen years. And it was partly because they liked Sophie so much that, when Claire asked for her again, they’d been prepared to turn a blind eye and let Sophie accept the booking. In essence, the agency’s message was clear: Sophie was a good nurse, she’d committed one terrible lapse of judgement, they didn’t want that to tarnish her reputation entirely.

  As for Phil Adams, Richard was amazed to learn that, legally, he was indeed Polly’s husband. What’s more, once they contacted Polly’s lawyer, they discovered that Polly had never made a will, so Phil had just inherited her entire estate. Richard went up to the house to tell Phil this news in person, but Phil remained entirely underwhelmed as he continued to insist that Polly died penniless.

  As for how wealthy—or otherwise—Polly had been when she died, that had so far been much harder to prove because it turned out that Polly had numerous bank accounts and was in the habit of throwing all letters from the banks straight into the bin unopened. Fidel had tracked down as many of the accounts as he could and had requested her banks send over copy statements of her accounts, but they hadn’t arrived yet.

  And, while Richard was trying to focus on the case, he still couldn’t work out what was up with his mother. Since her first afternoon at Catherine’s bar, she’d become firm friends with Catherine and had become something of a fixture in the bar. As he drove home each night, Richard would see his mother and Catherine sitting out on the deck of the bar sharing a drink and a chat. What they talked about, Richard had no idea.

  But as Jennifer broke dinner engagement after dinner engagement with her son, Richard realised that he didn’t know what he found more baffling: that his mother would come out alone to see him; or that, now she was here, she seemed to have no interest in seeing him. He was dimly aware that there was a quick solution to his quandary, and that would be if he rang his father and asked him what on earth his mother was up to. However, Richard was pretty sure that he hadn’t directly phoned his father since the turn of the century, and he realised—when push came to shove—that he seemed to have lost the belief that he was even capable of speaking to his father on the phone. After all, what would they say to each other?

  So, instead of getting to the bottom of what his mother was up to on the island, Richard threw himself into his work, and, in particular, he found himself coming back to the questions at the heart of the case.

  How had the killer known to be on the cliff steps at the precise moment that Polly was about to run down them? And how was it possible to explain the coincidence that she’d just said she’d commit suicide as well? And—most baffling of all for Richard—how did the killer then vanish into thin air immediately afterwards? Was it this ‘Man in a Yellow Raincoat’ that they needed to find? Or someone else? And also, who’d been sending the threatening letters to Polly? And, as much as he tried to focus on the bigger questions, Richard couldn’t help but also worry over who it was who’d put Claire’s mobile phone in the chandelier of the sitting room before the murder. And why had it been put there? After all, if someone wanted to get rid of a phone, why didn’t they just turn it off and put it in a drawer? Or throw it in the sea? Why did it have to be hidden in a chandelier? It had to have some meaning, but what on earth could it be?

  On the fifth day of Jennifer’s visit, there were significant breakthroughs, both in the case and in Richard’s understanding of what his mother was up to.

  In the morning, they finally got the reports back from the labs on Guadeloupe.

  As for the threatening letters they’d found in Polly’s locked drawer, the only fingerprints they’d been able to identify belonged to Polly. What was more, they’d analysed the A4 paper the cut-out letters were glued to—and the glue that had been used—and had only been able to conclude that they were both popular brands that were readily available in the Caribbean and beyond.

  As for the autopsy report, that had made for far more interesting reading. Firstly, the pathologist had tested Polly’s blood and hair and been able to confirm that she’d not only not had any narcotics in her system when she’d died, but she hadn’t taken any narcotics in the previous six months, either.

  Polly really had kicked her heroin habit before she’d died—which Richard and his team found surprising to say the least. After all, what were the chances that a long-standing heroin addict would get clean of drugs just in time to be murdered?

  But the pathologist was also able to confirm that while it had been the fall from the cliff that had snapped Polly’s neck and killed her, she’d sustained a significant injury to her head pre-mortem. There’d been bruising and a deep cut under Polly’s hair just behind her left ear. What was more, the pathologist had also been able to recover trace samples of a mossy substance from in and around this wound behind Polly’s ear. And the trace samples of moss from her wound matched the moss that was on the branch the police had found at the scene. But then, this was hardly surprising, as the pathologist was also able to prove that the blood on the branch also belonged to Polly.

  It all confirmed what Richard had been saying all along. Someone had been waiting on the steps before Polly arrived. This person had then attacked Polly with the branch—hit her in the head and cut her in the forearm as they briefly fought—and then, once Polly had fallen to her death, the killer had hidden the bloody branch in the bush further down the steps.

  How the killer then managed to vanish from the steps and get away without either leaving footprints on the sand or being seen by anyone else was still a mystery, though, and one that Richard was mulling as he picked up his lunchtime sandwich from Catherine’s bar.

  However, before Richard returned to the police station, his attention was drawn by a trilling laugh from the outside seating area. He recognised that laugh.

  With a presentiment of disaster, Richard went through to the back of the bar—still holding his banana sandwich neatly wrapped in brown greaseproof paper—and saw his mother sitting at a table overlooking the bay. But what gave Richard pause was the fact that Dwayne was also sitting with his mother—was clearly in mid-anecdote—and he could see his mother trying to stifle a laugh.

  ‘Oh, Dwayne, stop it!’ Jennifer said as Richard approached.

  Dwayne had the good grace to look awkward as hell the moment he saw his boss.

  ‘Hey, Chief,’ Dwayne said. ‘I was just passing and Jennifer here called me over. She wanted some advice on the glass-bottomed boat. You know, whether she should go on it or not.’

  Richard knew the boat well, if only because he’d always said that a boat with a hull made of glass that operated in shark-infested waters was precisely the last boat he’d ever get on.

  ‘And Dwayne’s saying it’s a must-see,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘But it’s a glass-bottomed boat,’ Richard said.

  ‘I know, imagine! Apparently you can see all the tropical fish and dolphins through the bottom.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richard repeated, unable to comprehend how his mother didn’t understand the very simple point he was making. ‘But that’s because the hull is made of glass. It could break at any moment.’

  ‘Oh I know, but you know what I’ve decided? You only live once. I’m going to give it a try!’

  Richard looked at his mother as though he were looking at a complete stranger.

  As the pause grew, Dwayne rose from his chair.

  ‘Anyway, Chief,’ he said. ‘Glad you’ve got your lunch. See you around, Jennifer.’

  As Dwayne left, Jennifer looked at the confusion in her son’s eyes.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I think I owe you an explanation.’

  Still clutching his grea
seproof package of sandwiches to his chest, Richard sat down, and, as he looked at his mother, he had to acknowledge that he’d rarely seen her look more relaxed. The few days of Caribbean sunshine had given her skin a healthy glow.

  ‘I’m sorry if you think my behaviour is shocking, Richard, but I came out here …’ Here, Jennifer sighed sadly, more for herself than for her son. ‘I came out here because I wasn’t very happy at home.’

  Even as Jennifer said the words, Richard realised that his hearing had gone—it was as though there was suddenly a ball of cotton wool engulfing him. His mother wasn’t happy?

  ‘You see, it’s your father.’ Here, Jennifer took one of Richard’s hands from his packed lunch and cupped it in hers. ‘Because we both know he’s a very difficult man.’ Richard still felt as though he was encased in cotton, he was having difficulty making sense of what his mother was telling him. ‘And I have to be honest, it’s been tough living with him since he retired.’

  Richard’s dad had retired three years ago and Richard had presumed that his mother and father had been happy together ever since then. Of course they had. They were his mother and father.

  ‘You see, he just doesn’t understand that after all those years of him working all the hours God gave, I’ve built up a life for myself. And he expects me to drop it all so I can spend time with him. But when I do, he doesn’t know what he wants to do. And he’s a typical man, he can’t do anything on his own. You know, the other day he was having a bath upstairs, I was cooking him his lunch, and then he started calling for me. When I got upstairs and asked him what was wrong, he told me he was bored.

  ‘Well, he’s not the only one. I’m bored of not being my own person. So you should know, and there’s no easy way to say this, Richard, but you’re old enough. I told him we’re having a trial separation and then I booked my ticket out here to see you. And I have to say, it’s the best thing I’ve done in years. I was wound up like a spring when I got out here. I think I’ve been wound up like a spring my whole life. But the Caribbean has relaxed me. Coming here was precisely what I needed.’