Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Who the hell is Luc Pichou?’

  Chapter 10

  There was an area of Honoré just beyond the harbour that it wasn’t wise to go to unless you were already known to its residents. It didn’t have a name as such, but it was made up of about forty cinder block and corrugated iron dwellings, and, on a sunny day, a tourist might make it halfway down the first road before the general decrepitude and blandly hostile stares from the locals would make them realise the area wasn’t even remotely safe. At night, any tourist that made it halfway down a road might not make it out again—and almost certainly not with their wallet, watch or phone.

  Dwayne had been born in one of these streets, and—as a one-time resident—the families who lived there accepted him as ‘one of their own’. As long as the rest of the police force stayed away, they’d tolerate the odd intervention from Dwayne, if only because, as far as anyone could remember, Dwayne had never intervened. Like any closed-off community, then, the shanty town was most happy when it was left alone to get on with its obscure rules, rituals and observances without undue scrutiny from the outside world. A lot like the British upper classes, Richard had often thought to himself.

  ‘You stay close to my side, and you should be okay,’ Dwayne whispered to his boss as he, Richard and Camille walked down the dusty street with Richard trying to put any thoughts of being in a Western movie out of his mind.

  ‘Why don’t we just invite this Mr Pichou to the station to help with our inquiries?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Don’t worry, Chief. It’s not far now.’

  As Dwayne said this, he turned behind the wreck of an old building with shrubs growing out of the walls and Richard was suddenly plunged into the overpoweringly sweet stench of rotting bins as he followed Dwayne to a cluster of one-storey shacks that were built in the lee of a sheer rock face.

  When Dwayne finally indicated the house they were visiting, Richard realised it was the very definition of a lean-to, as it was constructed of what appeared to be driftwood and sheets of ancient corrugated iron, but the whole structure was skewed, as if it had tried to fall over and had only been stopped from doing so by the intervention of the rock face it had fallen against.

  Richard couldn’t believe this ramshackle shack was inhabited, but he was doubly surprised to see someone inside it sitting on an old armchair and watching television.

  This was Luc Pichou, Richard realised. The man was perhaps in his thirties and was wearing old tracksuit trousers and a bright pink string vest. He was wiry—strongly muscled—and he had thick-matted dreadlocks that hung down his back to his waist.

  As Dwayne, Richard and Camille approached, Luc looked up at them, suspicion in his eyes.

  ‘No worries,’ Dwayne said as an introduction, and then offered up a fist bump for Luc.

  Luc reluctantly fist bumped Dwayne. ‘What have you brought them for?’ he asked, with a nod at Richard and Camille.

  Dwayne sat down and explained that they were investigating a murder and he reckoned that maybe Luc could help them. Once Dwayne had made his pitch, Luc sniffed and then looked at Richard and Camille again. He then looked back at Dwayne.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ Luc said. ‘Them? Or you?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘On the usual terms?’

  Richard didn’t quite understand what Luc was referring to, but while Dwayne started having a quiet word with Luc, Richard looked about and couldn’t work out if he was horrified by Luc’s house or quietly impressed. The cliff face that the structure was leaning against had been painted white, electricity cables and lights had been bolted directly into the rocks, and, among the odds and sods of furniture, Richard could see what looked like a plumbed-in washing machine. Or maybe it was a cooker. It was hard to tell. But the room was colourfully decorated with empty bottles of booze of all types, there were salt-stained wall hangings nailed to bits of wood here and there, and it clearly worked as a functioning home. In fact, Richard found himself realising, his rudimentary shack on the beach that he shared with a lizard he couldn’t get rid of, had more in common with this lean-to than was entirely comfortable.

  Luc eventually leaned back in his chair and looked at Richard and Camille.

  ‘Okay, so what do you want to know?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ Richard said. ‘We just want to know why we found a yellow raincoat covered in your fingerprints in a tunnel under Polly Carter’s house.’

  Luc didn’t even blink.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Luc turned to Dwayne. ‘And I have your word?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Richard said, unable to stop himself. ‘And what “word” would this be?’

  ‘Luc’s agreed to help us,’ Dwayne said, ‘with one proviso, Chief. We can’t prosecute him if he implicates himself in any kind of illegal activity.’

  ‘Including murder?’ Richard asked sarcastically.

  ‘Of course not. But he’s talking to us as a confidential informant. That was the deal. If he implicates himself in answering our questions and it’s not part of our main investigation, we’ve got to let it go. That’s what I agreed.’

  ‘Or I won’t help you,’ Luc said.

  ‘That’s fine.’ Camille quickly jumped in before Richard could complain.

  For his part, Richard was dismayed. In what way was it ever acceptable to let anyone off for any kind of misdemeanour? They were the police, after all.

  ‘So why don’t you tell us what your coat was doing there?’ Camille said, keeping the conversation on track.

  ‘Okay,’ Luc said, unfussed. ‘My coat’s there because I left it there the last time I was there.’

  ‘You admit to being in the tunnel under Polly Carter’s house?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And what were you doing there?’

  ‘Selling Polly drugs.’

  Richard and Camille exchanged a sharp glance.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I was selling her drugs.’

  ‘But what sort of drugs?’

  ‘What she always ordered from me. Heroin.’

  ‘Hang on, are you saying Polly Carter was still using heroin?’

  ‘Of course, or she wouldn’t have ordered any from me.’

  ‘But we’ve got an autopsy report that says there were no drugs in her system when she died.’

  ‘Then your autopsy report’s wrong.’

  Richard was reeling.

  ‘When was this?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Can you tell us exactly when it was you sold Polly the heroin?’

  Luc had difficulty pinning down the exact day, but with Dwayne’s help, they were soon able to work out that it must have been three days before Polly was killed.

  ‘Hang on,’ Richard said, unable to get a handle on what Luc was telling them. ‘You’re saying you went up to Polly’s house three days before she was killed?’

  ‘If that’s what you’re saying.’

  Richard remembered that Juliette had said she’d seen a man in a yellow raincoat on the cliff tops a few days before Polly had been killed.

  ‘And were you by any chance wearing your yellow raincoat then?’

  ‘I was, as it happens.’

  ‘And how did you deliver the drugs to Polly?’

  ‘Well,’ Luc said, still seemingly entirely unconcerned, ‘I’ve made a tonne of money from that woman over the years, but if you’re asking how I got the gear to her, well there’s an old path up to her house from here. So I walked. And then, because Polly doesn’t like anyone knowing about her habit, she always meets me in this old tunnel under her house.’

  ‘And how do you get to the tunnel?’

  ‘That’s easy. You go down the steps in the cliff, but there’s this big bush about halfway down, and if you go through it, there’s a secret opening in the cliff just behind it. You can step into that tunnel easily enough.’

  ‘I see,’ Richard said, not entirely agreeing that it
would be easy to get into the tunnel. ‘But I have to ask again. Are you really saying that you were delivering heroin to Polly Carter three days before she died?’

  ‘Yeah. And if you’re asking, it was Black Tar heroin. The best for smoking. But then that’s how she took it, she wouldn’t inject. Said her skin was too precious to her.’

  ‘And do you often take her heroin?’

  ‘Used to. But I’ve not done a deal with her for months.’

  ‘So she’s been clean these last few months?’

  ‘I reckon so. Or she’s been buying from someone other than me.’

  ‘And how much heroin did you sell her on this occasion?’ Luc paused dramatically before answering.

  ‘Ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I know. It was the biggest pay day I’ve ever had.’ Richard remembered the ten thousand dollars that Polly had taken out of her bank in cash three days before she was killed. If Luc was to be believed, then she’d not taken out the money to give to Max—or anyone else—it had been to buy a vast quantity of heroin. Heroin that wasn’t in her system when she died, and, as the tests on her hair proved, she hadn’t used in the previous six months, either. So what the hell was going on?

  But even as one part of Richard’s brain was running through the ramifications of Polly’s heroin purchase—if true—there was a far more procedural part of his brain that had fixed on something else.

  ‘So, just to be clear, you’re saying you were wearing your yellow raincoat when you took her the heroin three days before she died?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘And why exactly were you wearing this raincoat?’

  Luc looked at Richard as though he were an idiot.

  ‘It was raining.’

  ‘It was?’

  ‘Real hard. But only on the walk up to the house. By the time I got to the cliffs, the sun was out again. That’s why I left my coat in the tunnel, I didn’t want to wear it on the way back. Which is why I reckon you found it in the tunnel. It’s where I left it.’

  ‘And have you been to Polly’s house since then?’

  ‘After dropping off that much gear? No way. That’s the last time I saw her alive.’

  ‘So you weren’t there the morning she died?’

  ‘No way. And I wasn’t wearing any kind of yellow coat on the day she died. How could I? I’ve only got one yellow coat and I’d left it in the tunnel three days before.’

  ‘Do you mind if we search your house?’ Richard asked. Luc’s eyes narrowed. ‘If it’s Dwayne who does the searching.’

  Richard nodded for Dwayne, and Dwayne got up and started searching the shack.

  ‘Okay,’ Richard said. ‘So, if you sold Polly ten thousand dollars of heroin, would you mind showing us the cash she gave you?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You must have plenty of the cash still lying around.’

  Here, Luc had the good grace to look awkward for the first time.

  ‘That’s the thing. You see, Polly’s money couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I owed a fair bit around the island. For this and that. You know? And it’s kind of gone.’

  ‘You had ten thousand dollars’ worth of debts on the island?’ Richard asked incredulously.

  ‘I know,’ Luc said, acknowledging how unlikely this sounded. ‘But they’d racked up over the years, and you know how it goes, you borrow money to pay off money.’

  ‘So you admit you’ve got debts?’ Richard asked, sharpening his attention.

  Luc made sure he was looking directly at Richard as he answered.

  ‘Not any more,’ he said.

  Richard looked straight back. He could see that Luc seemed careful around the police—as could be expected of someone with his background—but otherwise he seemed at ease within himself. In which case, Richard decided, it was time to rattle his cage.

  ‘Then let me offer up an alternative theory to the one you’ve presented us,’ Richard said. ‘And in this alternate theory, I think Polly did indeed ask you for ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin—like you said—but you didn’t deliver it three days before she died. You delivered it on the day she died. Because that was when you killed her.’ Richard saw Luc clench his jaw, but he carried on regardless. ‘And this is what I think happened. You were heading down the steps of the cliff with the heroin—as arranged with Polly—when you heard a commotion going on back up at the top of the cliff. And that much we know because we’ve got a witness who places you at the scene of the crime only moments before Polly was killed.’

  ‘What?’ Luc said, his defences briefly bridged.

  ‘A witness saw someone in a yellow raincoat go down the steps of the cliff just before Polly died.’

  ‘Someone?’ Luc said, anger in his voice. ‘Or me? Which was it, policeman?’

  ‘Admittedly, it wasn’t a positive identification of you, but a person in a yellow raincoat was seen on the steps moments before the murder, a yellow raincoat was found at the scene with only your fingerprints on it, ergo the man in the yellow raincoat was you.

  ‘So, there you were on the cliff steps as Polly argued with her sister. Maybe you peeked back around the corner and saw the whole thing. Maybe you even saw the moment when Polly said that she was going to end her life by throwing herself to her death and started running down the stairs. Why she’d threaten to commit suicide first, I don’t know. Maybe you’d like to tell me?’ Luc didn’t move a muscle. ‘Very well. It’s possible she was just being melodramatic—after all, nearly everyone we meet tells us how histrionic Polly was.

  ‘But, either way, I think you saw a chance to make a fast buck. You waited for her to come around the corner with the ten thousand dollars. And once she’d handed it over to you, you picked up a big stick that was lying around and knocked Polly in the head so she fell to her death. You then hid the murder weapon under a bush, carried on down the cliff steps until you reached the entrance to the secret tunnel, and then vanished into it, knowing you could wait in safety there. Then, later on—that night, maybe—you took off your distinctive yellow coat, slipped back out onto the steps and returned to the safety of the town, entirely unseen. With ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin you could still sell, and a bonus ten grand in cash, because—I’ll be honest—people have killed for a lot less.’ There was a long moment while Luc looked at Richard.

  ‘None of that happened,’ he eventually said.

  Camille stepped in. ‘But the problem is, Luc, we’ve searched Polly’s house from top to bottom and we’ve not found ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin anywhere.’

  ‘I told you!’ Luc said, finally lighting the touch paper to his anger. ‘I sold her the heroin! What she did with it afterwards isn’t my problem! Maybe she’s not the only heroin addict in the house? Maybe she bought it for someone else? Have you considered that?’

  Richard looked at Luc. He didn’t want to admit it, but he hadn’t even quite believed his ‘proof’ of Luc’s guilt even as he’d been explaining it to him. After all, it was coincidental in the extreme that Luc would overhear Polly’s threat to kill herself at the precise moment that it suited him to kill her. What was more, ten thousand dollars was a bulky amount of cash and, by all accounts, Polly had just been wearing a light summer dress on the morning she was killed—there’d have been nowhere to hide that amount of cash about her person. And, finally, even if Richard could believe that Luc was on the steps at the precise moment he needed to kill Polly, Richard couldn’t begin to see how Luc might have got hold of Claire’s mobile phone and hidden it in the ceiling chandelier of Polly’s sitting room long before then, because Richard was still convinced that understanding why Claire’s phone was put in the chandelier was critical to understanding why Polly was killed.

  Dwayne reappeared from the recesses of the shack.

  ‘There’s no other raincoat here, Chief,’ he said. ‘Yellow or otherwise.’

  ‘And that’s because it’s lik
e I told you,’ Luc said. ‘I left my yellow coat in the tunnel three days before Polly was killed. Because three days before, it was raining—and it never rained the morning she died.’

  Richard remembered back to the morning that Polly had been killed and realised that Luc was right. Because, as he’d looked up at the sky to curse a god that had given parrots the ability to crap in cups of tea from a distance, there hadn’t been a single cloud to see.

  Back at the police station, Richard found himself unable to control his irritation, and it wasn’t just because he found the logic of what Luc had told them increasingly believable. Nor was it entirely because he couldn’t stop thinking about his mother and her attempts to live a second youth on the same island that he was trying to solve a murder case—although it was quite a bit to do with that. In fact, it was a lot to do with that. But what Richard tried to focus on was the fact that Polly had apparently bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin—if Luc was to be believed—three days before she died. Even though the autopsy report found no evidence of recent drugs use in her body or historic drugs use in her hair.

  Looking at the whiteboard, Richard considered the names he could see. Claire, Sophie, Phil, Max, Juliette and Alain. So, if Polly wasn’t the heroin addict, then who on that list could she have been buying it for?

  It was hard to imagine any of them taking heroin, but there was one person on the list who maybe was a better candidate than the others: Phil Adams. After all, he’d already admitted that when he’d had a week with Polly in Vegas before they got married, they’d spent the whole time getting blasted on drugs together. And Richard remembered that when they’d first interviewed Claire, she’d complained that Phil and Polly had spent most of the nineties stoned on drugs together. And now Richard was thinking about it, he also remembered how he’d felt it was odd when Phil told him that he’d been in rehab for anxiety. Surely, even in Los Angeles, rehab was for greater problems than anxiousness?

  But how to find out the truth about whether or not Phil was a user? Going back through Phil’s original witness statement, Richard was reminded that Phil had a two-picture deal with a major Hollywood studio, and it occurred to him that they’d be able to help.