Richard allowed his confusion to quicken a little into anger. After all, what was his mother doing saying she’d walked out on his father? Didn’t their marriage vows mean they had to be together in sickness and health forever and ever amen? That’s what marriage was in Richard’s mind. An ideal—of course—but also an unbreakable vow. The virtue of the promise was not in its making, but in its observance.
And still the crickets chirped from the computer speakers just out of sync with the crickets outside the window, so that sometimes they seemed to be getting more in time with each other, and then less in time.
And that’s when Richard had a stunning realisation.
The chirps in the recording were out of time with the chirps of the crickets outside his window!
Richard dashed over to his bookshelves and scrabbled down his book on the indigenous insects of the Caribbean. What else would he need? A thermometer—luckily there was one nailed to the outside of the house he could use—and a chart of average temperatures on the island. But first he had to see if his memory was correct. Richard flicked through his book on insects until he found exactly what he was looking for. It was an equation called Dolbear’s Law. Richard read it through again to check that he understood it.
Yup, he thought to himself, if he could just work through the maths of the equation, there was every chance he’d be able to reveal the identity of Polly Carter’s killer!
The following morning, Richard was full of beans as he entered the police station, his laptop and the book on insects wedged firmly under his arm. But before he could unleash any of his findings on his team, Fidel was standing up parade-ground smart behind his desk, his notebook in his hand.
‘Good morning, sir!’ Fidel said.
‘Good morning, Fidel, and how are you this morning?’
‘I’ve made a breakthrough.’
‘You have, have you?’
Fidel’s instincts twitched as he realised that Richard had made a rival breakthrough.
‘Yes I have,’ he said with a lot less confidence.
‘No, go on, let’s hear it,’ Richard said, unable to keep the smugness out of his voice.
‘Well, sir … it’s just, I went to evensong at church last night. As you suggested. And I got up at the end of the service—with the priest’s say so, of course—and point blank asked the congregation if they’d seen Alain at the Sunday service the morning Polly was murdered. And the thing is, there was no one there who could remember seeing him!’
‘Well well well,’ Richard said. ‘Good work, Fidel, and that fits with what I was able to work out last night as well.’
‘It does, sir?’
‘Oh yes,’ Richard said as he went to Dwayne’s desk and carefully opened his book on insects to reveal that he’d used it to transport all of the individual cut-out newspaper letters that he’d been able to liberate from the sheets of A4. Each one of the scraps was now bone dry and it was possible to read what had been printed on the other side. Although, as the pieces were only a centimetre or so square, there was very little in the way of text on the ‘other’ side of the letters to be read. Richard quickly instructed Dwayne and Fidel to go through each and every one of them, trying to see if they could at least infer whether the newspaper they’d all been cut from came from Saint-Marie, or the UK—or the US, even, considering that this was where Phil Adams and Polly spent so much of their time.
‘As for what I’ve been up to,’ Richard said as he went over to his desk and opened up his laptop, ‘all will become clear when I play you this recording that Juliette made of Alain committing adultery with Polly.’
Camille, Dwayne and Fidel all crowded around Richard’s laptop as he played the recording of crickets that he’d listened to the night before.
Fidel was the first to speak. ‘But there’s nothing to hear, sir.’
‘Nothing human,’ Richard agreed. ‘But what’s that you can hear in the background?’
‘It’s just a load of crickets chirping,’ Dwayne said.
‘Exactly!’ Richard said, gleefully. ‘Then tell me, what can you hear in this recording?’
As he said this, Richard pulled his phone out of his pocket, got up his voice memo application and pressed the play button. Like a magician finally revealing the card that was chosen, Richard then put the phone down on the table while it played out the recording he had made of the crickets chirping outside his window the night before.
Richard’s team looked at each other as though Richard had gone mad.
‘But that’s also just crickets chirping,’ Dwayne said.
‘Wait!’ Camille said, jumping in. ‘Don’t say anything, it’s a trap.’
Richard turned to Camille and raised an eyebrow, a skill he had hitherto been unaware he possessed.
‘But don’t you want to know how those two recordings prove that Alain’s been lying to us?’ Richard asked, and then he went over to Dwayne’s desk, retrieved his book on the insects of the Caribbean and held it up for all to see.
‘You’re kidding me,’ Camille said. ‘The book was useful?’
‘All knowledge is useful, Camille,’ Richard said. ‘But, since you’re asking, yes, this book on the insects of the Caribbean could well have identified our killer!’
‘But how, sir?’ Fidel asked, and then he turned to Camille apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, but I want to know.’
‘Well it’s funny you should ask, Fidel,’ Richard said, licking his finger and then turning the pages of the old book until he found what he was looking for. ‘You see, I remembered reading that there was this chap called Amos Dolbear who, back in the nineteenth century, discovered that the speed of a cricket’s chirp was directly proportional to the ambient air temperature outside.’
‘Come again?’ Dwayne asked.
‘In fact,’ Richard continued, now in full flow, ‘as Dolbear plotted the incidence of cricket chirps against the air temperature, he made a discovery. The relationship between the temperature and the number of chirps was directly correlated such that, if you ever wanted to work out the ambient air temperature—called Tf, let’s say—all you had to do was count the number of chirps the cricket made over a minute—N60 let’s say—subtract forty from that number, divide it by four, and then get your result and add fifty to it.’
There was a very long pause while Richard’s team looked at him.
‘I’m going to say it again,’ Dwayne said to Camille and Fidel before turning back to Richard. ‘Come again?’
‘Well, Alain told us that he had his affair with Polly over a mad few days at Christmas time. Fair enough. But by counting the number of chirps in the background crickets in the recording his wife made of him and Polly, I was able to work out that there were one hundred and ninety chirps per minute.’
‘Wait wait wait wait,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands for everyone’s attention. ‘You counted the number of chirps in the recording?’
‘Of course. And by plugging that number—the one hundred and ninety chirps per minute—into Dolbear’s equation, I was able to work out that the ambient temperature outside when Juliette made that recording was eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.’
‘Which is kind of hot,’ Camille said, already realising where Richard was going with this.
‘Precisely!’ Richard agreed, although he’d have liked to dispute Camille’s statement that eighty-eight degrees was only ‘kind of’ hot. ‘And you only get temperatures that high once you get to our summer, which only really kicked in in the last month. In fact, if you look at these printouts, you’ll see the significance instantly.’
Here, Richard pulled out pages he’d printed off from the Saint-Marie Department of Meteorology showing daily minimum and maximum temperatures going back to the beginning of the year.
‘Because back at Christmas and January—when Alain said the recordings were made—the temperature on the island never reached the dizzy heights of eighty-eight degrees. In fact, the highest it got in both December and January wa
s seventy-five degrees.’
‘So you’re saying the recordings aren’t from then!’ Fidel said.
‘I am! In fact, if you go through this chart of temperatures for the year, there isn’t a single day when the temperature on the island reaches as high as eighty-eight degrees until July, which was only last month.’
Dwayne turned to his boss and very carefully said, ‘So you’re saying you can use the chirps of crickets to prove in court that the recording of Polly and Alain going to bed together isn’t from last Christmas. In fact, it’s only a month old.’
‘Got it in one,’ Richard said.
Chapter 12
Leaving Dwayne and Fidel back at the station to see what they could glean from the scraps of newspaper Richard had prepared the night before, Richard and Camille drove up to Polly’s house to speak to Alain and Juliette. On the way, Richard realised that he had a ticklish subject he wanted to broach with his partner.
‘Camille?’ he asked from the passenger seat, staring directly ahead as though he hadn’t just spoken.
Camille gave her boss a glance as she drove. ‘Yes, sir?’
Still without moving his head, Richard said, ‘I think I want your advice.’
Camille tried not to startle, but in the two years she’d known Richard, he hadn’t asked her for her advice even once. But she also knew that Richard was like one of the spiky iguanas that roamed the island. They were best approached from sideways on.
‘Oh?’ she said, pretending that it wasn’t that big a deal.
‘Or maybe I don’t,’ Richard said, immediately losing confidence.
Camille waited. She guessed Richard would come to her if she gave him the space. But Richard continued to sit in silence as Camille drove up the hairpin bends that led to Polly’s house. And then he continued to sit in silence as she drove up the dusty driveway. Finally, with a crunch of wheels on gravel, Camille parked outside Polly’s house and turned off the thudding diesel engine.
The silence between them grew until Camille could take it no more.
‘Then what do you need my advice—’ Camille started saying before Richard cut across her with, ‘Actually, can we just pretend we never had this conversation?’
‘But we’ve not had a conversation, sir,’ she said.
‘We have. This is a conversation.’
‘But it’s not. Not if you’ve not said what you wanted saying, sir.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ Richard blurted, trying to change the subject. ‘You never call me Chief like the others do.’
Camille looked at her boss, amazed.
‘What?’
‘The others sometimes call me Chief. Even the Commissioner of Police. But you never do. You only ever call me sir.’
Camille didn’t dignify this statement of neurotic neediness with a reply. For his part, Richard realised that he was now feeling pretty stupid, so he went to open the passenger-side door to leave—which was when Camille grabbed his right elbow to stop him.
‘But if it’s advice you want, it’s not me you need to talk to,’ Camille said. ‘I think you need to talk to my mother.’
‘I do?’ Richard said. ‘Why?’
‘Because my mother told me to tell you that if you wanted help sorting your mother out, you needed to talk to her.’
Richard felt shame flood his body.
‘She thinks my mother needs sorting out?’ he said.
Camille looked at her boss and her heart filled with compassion for this awkward, broken man. ‘Your mother’s on holiday. On her own. She chats up men she meets in the bar. And your father’s nowhere to be seen. You don’t have to be a detective to work out something’s going on … sir.’
Richard continued looking at his subordinate, unable to say anything. He then looked away from Camille and stared out of the jeep’s windscreen for a long moment.
After a fair few further moments of thought, he then said, ‘This windscreen’s filthy.’
Camille shook her head to herself as she opened the door on her side and climbed out of the jeep. Richard either would go and talk to her mother or he wouldn’t. She’d passed on the message. That was all she could do.
They found Alain up by the swimming pool. He was cleaning leaves off the surface with a long pole and net.
‘Good morning,’ Alain said to Richard and Camille as they approached.
‘Good morning,’ Richard replied, surprised to see Alain working on the house. ‘I see you’re still keeping the place spick and span.’
‘A photographer’s coming round later on to take photos. Mr Adams said he’s going to put the house up for sale.’
‘Phil Adams is selling the house?’ Camille asked.
‘That’s right. He explained to me how he’d inherited Polly’s estate and he was going to sell it all to the highest bidder.’
Richard and Camille looked at each other, surprised. After all, Phil had always claimed that he wasn’t interested in Polly’s money—indeed, that she didn’t have any—but he was acting fast enough to liquidise whatever cash the estate did have, wasn’t he? But first things first.
‘Could we have a word?’
‘Of course,’ Alain said.
‘Because I think you haven’t been entirely truthful with us, have you?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Alain said.
‘For starters, you weren’t at church when Polly Carter was killed, were you?’
‘I was.’
‘Then how come we’ve not been able to find a single member of the congregation who remembers seeing you?’
‘I … I don’t know,’ Alain said limply.
‘But let’s park that for the moment, because you’ve got a far bigger problem to contend with, and that’s the fact that we also now know that you didn’t finish your affair with Polly at Christmas. It carried on after she returned from rehab, didn’t it?’
Alain was stunned. Beyond comprehension.
‘But tell me, was it your idea to lie to us that it was over then, or was it your wife’s?’
Alain looked from Richard to Camille, and then back from Camille to Richard. He then put down the swimming pool net he was holding and walked away to a bench that was in between two nearby palm trees. Richard and Camille followed and waited for Alain to gather his thoughts—although Richard inched himself over so he was standing in the thin strip of shade that was thrown by the trunk of one of the two palm trees.
Eventually, Alain looked up at the police and there was only pain in his eyes.
‘I told Juliette we shouldn’t lie to you,’ he said.
Camille went and sat down next to Alain on the bench. She didn’t say anything, but her presence was enough to make him look at her.
‘And you’re right,’ he said. ‘Our affair wasn’t over. Juliette made me promise I couldn’t tell you. You see, it wasn’t just an affair. I fell for Polly. Hard. And she for me. We didn’t think we would, but … well, there’s no accounting for the affairs of the heart, is there? Because living with Juliette is … well, I believe in the vows we took, but she’s a bitter and unkind woman. And with Polly, it just clicked. You know?’
Camille nodded. She wanted Alain to know she
understood exactly what he was describing, and her
support gave Alain the courage to go on.
‘Although I wasn’t lying when I said it was a few days over Christmas. Because I discovered that Polly was still secretly smoking heroin. She’s got this tunnel under the house she goes to. I know you found it the other day. Anyway, she’d told me she was off the drugs when we started having our affair, but when I realised she’d been lying to me, it made me re-evaluate everything. Because there was something about her keeping this secret from me—and how it made me feel—that made me realise that the whole affair was crazy. I am a churchgoer. Whether or not I could be happier with someone else, whether I even like my wife any more—let alone love her—I made my vows before God to stay with Juliette in sickness and in health. So I told Polly it
had to end between us.’
‘And when was this?’
‘The eighteenth of January.’
‘And how was Polly when you told her?’
‘She was ice calm. You know. She just accepted it. And the next day, she packed her bags and left. I had no idea where she’d gone, or why she’d gone, but I took it as her signal to me that it was over. And I knew what I had to do.’ Here, Alain took a deep breath before continuing. ‘I had to tell Juliette everything. I had to confess of my sins.’
‘She didn’t have any recordings of you and Polly at this time?’
‘No. But when I told her about affair, I also said that it was all over between me and Polly. Finished.’
‘And how did Juliette take the news?’
‘She was like a hurricane, throwing mugs and plates and such hurtful words at me, I didn’t know what I’d unleashed. But she was the one who was wronged. I had to take it. And what she told you the first time you talked to us was kind of true. Once Polly left the island for rehab, we were up here on our own, and we just had to get on with our lives. After a week or so, it was a bit better, and after that, we seemed to come to an understanding. We’d share the same house. We’d be civil with each other. Up to a point. And maybe we could get our relationship back on track in time.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not really, but we were at least polite. The only thing that changed was Juliette stopped coming to church with me and instead started training for the island triathlon at the end of this year.’
‘And how were you while Polly was gone?’
‘I was a mess. Because the more I told myself our affair had been wrong, the more I found myself thinking about Polly. How she’d made me feel. How I felt I could do anything—go anywhere—when I was with her. I was so confused. But as the weeks turned into months, I came to realise that I’d still been in the wrong, and my life with Juliette was my punishment from God for what I’d done.’
Killing Of Polly Carter Page 18