Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  Richard frowned.

  ‘I know,’ Catherine said, misreading Richard’s frown. ‘She’s not happy at all.’

  ‘No, sorry to interrupt, but she thinks I’m happy out here?’

  ‘Of course. You are.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about you.’

  ‘But you started it.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘You said I was happy.’

  ‘But you are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Look at me, Catherine. Do I look happy to you?’

  ‘It’s your mother we’re talking about, can you stop being so … male!’

  At this, Richard sat up straighter in his chair. Empirical evidence he’d collected over the years had taught him that when a woman accused him of being too male, his only hope was to react in exactly the same way each time, which was to tilt his head to one side as though he was now listening—and continue to remain silent until that person had finished telling him all the different ways that he was in the wrong.

  ‘Thank you,’ Catherine said, believing she’d finally got through to Richard. ‘Because last night, your mother and I talked. A lot. And I think she’s ready to go home. Oh she still says how much she loves it out here—how she’s finally living—but I’ve been running this bar a long time, and I recognise the signs. This is a holiday romance she’s having. A holiday romance with the island. I think she still wants to be with your father. I can tell. It’s just, he takes her for granted. She’s invisible to him. And it kills a woman if she thinks she’s invisible.

  ‘And worse than that, your father thinks your mother’s job is to shop, cook and clean for him. To get him his meals. To wash his clothes. She told me that since he retired, your father just sits in his chair all day long expecting to be included in whatever your mother’s doing. And then, when she does include him in her plans, he just complains that he’d rather be sitting in a chair. This is no way to keep a relationship alive.

  ‘So this is what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to get your father to change. To rekindle the romance in their relationship and sweep your mother off her feet.’

  Richard tried to imagine his father being romantic and failed. His father was about as romantic as a henge.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘You’re saying you think my father should sweep my mother off her feet?’

  ‘There has to be romance in his soul somewhere.’

  ‘Really, you’ve not met my father. There isn’t,’ Richard said.

  ‘Oh but there is,’ Catherine said, leaning forward, her eyes twinkling. ‘There’s romance in everyone’s heart. Even yours, Richard Poole.’

  ‘But how exactly can I get my father to sweep my mother off her feet seeing as he’s currently three thousand miles away?’

  ‘Then you have to get him to come here.’

  ‘Ha!’ Richard said. ‘My father doesn’t go abroad. He always says that there’s nothing the world can offer him that he can’t do better in the UK.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s the person your mother married?’

  ‘Well, in his defence, it is true.’

  ‘Then I despair for you! I despair for your mother!’ Catherine was about to get up when a thought occurred to her.

  ‘Although,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘if your father won’t do what you want him to do, why don’t you treat him like one of your suspects in a case, and see if you can trick him into revealing himself?’

  Richard was interested. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You could set a trap for him. Like when you wear a secret microphone and trick a criminal into making a confession in front of you. I know you police can be devious when you want to be.’

  This gave Richard pause. Was there in fact a way he could trick his father into a grand romantic gesture? It didn’t seem possible, and yet there was something about how Catherine had framed the problem that finally seemed to make sense for Richard. What if he viewed his mother’s situation as a puzzle that had to be solved? Because the one thing Richard knew about himself was that he was very good at solving puzzles.

  And with that thought, Richard ducked his eyes back down to the table of cut-out newspaper letters on the table in front of him. And with no idea of how rude he was being, he said, ‘Thank you, Catherine, that’s very useful, I’ll think about what you said.’

  For her part, Catherine supposed she’d expected no more from Richard—and she’d certainly been prepared for a lot less. He had at least listened to her.

  As for Richard, he was too busy turning the scraps of paper over and looking at them this way and that with a new sense of purpose. And it was as he picked them up and put them down again that he noticed that the letters on two different scraps of paper seemed to be in the same bright red font, and also seemed to be the same point size. Were both letters in fact cut from the same headline?

  One of the scraps was the letter ‘T’, and the other was a ‘H’. He turned over the ‘T’ first and saw that on the other side of the newspaper scrap there was a nonsensical list in tiny type. It said:

  castle

  beach

  ham

  Richard was puzzled. What on earth could be the newspaper article that would make a list of such words as ‘castle’, ‘beach’, and ‘ham’?

  Richard then turned over the letter ‘H’ and saw that there was a similarly sized list of words on the other side, but it made just as little sense.

  Horn

  Hol

  Grant

  But Richard was nothing if not diligent, so he turned the scraps of paper back over again to look at the ‘H’ and ‘T’ letters on the front. He knew that the most common pair of letters in the English language are ‘TH’ so he put them back together how he imagined they might have been in the original headline—so they spelled ‘Th’—and then he turned the bits of paper over again, only this time keeping them as a pair.

  Now that the pieces of paper were aligned properly, on the ‘other’ side it was possible to see that the scraps of meaningless words weren’t meaningless at all. Richard read:

  Horncastle

  Holbeach

  Grantham

  Richard knew these were all market towns in Lincolnshire. And that meant that the newspaper that had been used to make the threatening letters had almost certainly come from Lincolnshire.

  And only Polly’s sister Claire lived in Lincolnshire.

  Was it Claire who’d been sending the anonymous letters after all?

  Once Richard explained to a baffled Camille what he’d been able to deduce from the cut-out letters, they drove up to Polly’s house and were soon waiting for Claire in the study. Richard wanted to wait there if only because he was still fascinated by the bookcase that led down into the secret smugglers’ tunnel behind.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘but once you know that this section of the bookcase swings out, it’s obvious. There are even hinges down the right side.’

  ‘So what did my mother say?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘When you went to speak to her.’

  Richard turned back to look at Camille and flicked some imaginary fluff from the lapel of his suit jacket.

  ‘It has no bearing on the case, so I don’t think this is the right forum for a discussion.’

  ‘Of course, sir, and normally I’d agree, but we are actually just waiting for a witness, it can’t do any harm to talk about it.’

  ‘But we’re not waiting,’ Richard said. ‘Claire is just coming.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Camille said.

  ‘And that’s where you’re wrong, Camille, because she is.’ Richard held up his finger for silence because he could hear the squeak of a protesting wheel approaching, and, only a few seconds later, the door opened and Sophie pushed Claire into the room—the front left wheel of Claire’s wheelchair still squeaking in protest.

  ‘You
wanted to see me?’ Claire asked.

  ‘We did,’ Richard said.

  ‘Then, if that’s all, I’ll leave,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Yes, if you would,’ Claire said to Sophie somewhat dismissively.

  With Sophie gone, Claire folded her hands into her lap as though she were doing them a favour by her very presence.

  ‘Yes, thank you for meeting us,’ Richard said, ‘because we wanted to give you the chance to tell us the truth.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I’ve told you the truth.’

  ‘About everything?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Including the fact that you’re the person who’s been sending the threatening letters to your sister?’

  ‘But I haven’t.’

  ‘We’ve been able to work out that the messages were cut from a newspaper from Lincolnshire. And seeing as you’re the only person here who’s from Lincolnshire, that means that you’re behind the messages. You really shouldn’t have used the local newspaper.’

  Claire opened her mouth in shock at this news.

  Flashing a warning look to her boss to stay well away, Camille pulled up a little wooden chair so she could sit in front of Claire.

  ‘These last ten years must have been so hard for you. Losing your father so soon after your riding accident. And we all know who was to blame for that, don’t we? Your sister. Who’s caused you pain every day of your life since then. I could understand why you’d want to punish her. Why you’d want her to suffer.’

  It was barely perceptible, but Claire nodded.

  ‘It’s only natural,’ Camille said simply.

  Once again, the tiniest of nods from Claire. And when she spoke, her voice was thick with guilt.

  ‘I tried so hard,’ she said. ‘To move on. To forgive. But it’s like there are two me’s now. Because what I told you before is true. I get to run a farm, which I love. It even makes me rich. And that version of me counts my blessings almost every day. After all, I know deep down that what Polly did to me was just a stupid accident. She didn’t mean to disable me. And that’s the me who I am most of the time.

  ‘But then there’s the other me. The one who still dreams she can walk and run—and ride my horses—but then wakes up in pain. Who has to suffer the shame of being lifted into and out of a bath. Who can’t meet a man who can see beyond the metal frame of my wheelchair.’

  ‘And it was this other version of you that sent those letters?’ Camille asked.

  ‘Sort of, but not quite. I made the letters when I was feeling okay about myself. It took a whole weekend. To find the back copies of the local paper. To think of messages I could make with the letters. And then to cut out and stick the letters on.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Richard said. ‘You say that you made the letters when you were feeling … happy?’

  ‘Happy’s a bit strong, but definitely in a good place,’ Claire said. ‘Because, the thing is, I always knew there’d be a day coming up—maybe not that month, or even the next—but I’d wake up at 4am in despair. Without hope. Full of pain. And that version of me needed justice against Polly. The person who’d robbed me of my life. So, whatever state I was in when the despair grabbed me, I’d go to the safe in my study, get out one of these letters, put it in a typed envelope and send it to Polly in the Caribbean. And I know it sounds crazy, but I found that if I had something proactive to do—if I felt I was getting revenge—it helped me through the pain.’

  Richard noted how Claire had leaned into the word ‘revenge’ as she said it. Hurting Polly was something that mattered deeply to her—perhaps unsurprisingly, he couldn’t help but concede.

  ‘So there were six occasions when you sent the letters?’ Camille asked.

  ‘I sent all ten,’ Claire said, abashed. ‘I think Polly threw the first few away.’

  ‘But she must have known they were from you,’ Richard said.

  Claire looked at Richard and smiled sadly. ‘Not quite. You see, there were a lot of people at the farm and in the village who hated Polly for what she did to me. In fact, pretty much everyone who was out on that Boxing Day hunt that day, for example.’

  ‘But she must have guessed they were from you,’ Richard said again.

  ‘I know,’ Claire said almost with relish. ‘And that’s what made the letters such a perfect release for me. Polly would ninety per cent know they were from me, but she wouldn’t be able to prove it. You see, I even made sure I was wearing gloves when I touched the paper or the envelope, and I always used pre-gummed stamps. That way I was delivering the message I wanted to deliver when I was in the pit of despair without definitively saying it was me.

  ‘And Polly said she knew the letters were from me the moment I got out here. I denied it of course.’ Claire let out a little giggle as she said this, in a seriously misjudged attempt at humour. ‘But the strangest thing happened. After I’d told her I’d not sent the letters—and explained how it must have been someone else from the estate or village—Polly started crying. I was shocked. I’d never seen her be anything other than dismissive. Even at our mother’s funeral last year, she seemed unmoved. And here she was crying and saying how sorry she was she’d screwed my life up. And admitting she’d screwed her life up as well. And she said she wasn’t happy. She hadn’t been happy for some time, but she was making changes. That’s what she said to me when I got out here this time.’

  ‘And what changes were these?’ Camille said.

  ‘I don’t know. But just before she died, she said she had a gift for me.’

  ‘A gift for you?’

  ‘That’s right. It was the night before she died. And she said she had a gift she wanted to give me.’

  ‘Did she tell you what it was?’

  ‘I never found out. She was dead before she could give it to me.’

  Richard tried to imagine what that gift could have been. It couldn’t have been the heroin, could it? That didn’t seem to make sense.

  ‘But the following morning,’ Claire continued, ‘it was like everything was back to normal, and Polly was her usual arrogant and bullying self. Sitting in the kitchen, being rude and smoking, knowing how much it irritated me. When she asked me to go for a walk with her in the garden, I agreed, if only because I thought she’d explain what was going on—why she was so nice to me the night before, and what had changed overnight to make her suddenly so angry with me again. But the moment we were on our own, she started flipping out at me even more. I didn’t know what to think, she was spouting this … hatred at me. Blaming me for her drug addiction, blaming me for making her unhappy—I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong—and then, when we got to the top of the cliffs, she screamed at me that she was going to kill herself, and that’s when she ran down the cliff steps.’

  As Claire said this, Richard noticed Claire’s cheeks briefly pink with embarrassment, and then she looked away.

  ‘What’s that?’ Richard said, pulling over a chair and sitting down in front of Claire next to Camille.

  After a moment, Claire looked back at Richard.

  ‘What’s what?’ she said.

  ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

  ‘I’ve told you everything,’ Claire said, but Richard could see she was flustered.

  ‘No you haven’t. When you said your sister ran down the cliff steps, you looked guilty.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘You’re mistaken.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Richard looked at Claire, and realised something. ‘And I can’t help noticing that, although you’ve just recounted the story of your sister’s death, you did so without mentioning the man in yellow at all.’

  Guilt flashed into Claire’s eyes again, and Richard pounced.

  ‘Have you been lying to us about the person in the yellow coat?’ he asked, his voice harsh.

  Claire looked at Richard, and he could see she was desperate.

  ‘Who was it you saw on the steps before your sister ra
n down them?’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Yes. Who was it?’

  After a moment, Clair said in a small voice, ‘No one.’

  Silence filled the room, punctuated only by the insistent ticking of the mantelpiece clock.

  ‘You saw … no one?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Claire said.

  ‘You saw no one?’ Richard said again, appalled.

  ‘I’m sure you can explain,’ Camille said kindly.

  ‘Well … you see, I was so worried after Polly died. I mean, I was the last person to see her alive, wasn’t I? And I soon learnt that no one else apart from me had seen exactly what had happened at the top of the cliff. And the thing is, I knew you’d find out it was Polly who’d disabled me all those years ago. And I also worried you’d find out it was me who’d been sending her those letters. So when you started asking all those questions about where I was when Polly died, I knew I needed to do something to make you look at someone other than me …’

  ‘So you made up seeing someone in a yellow raincoat on the steps to throw us off the scent,’ Camille said.

  ‘But I saw a man in yellow on the steps—just not that morning.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Richard said, ‘did you see anyone on the steps immediately before your sister was murdered?’

  Claire looked at Richard and shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But it’s like I was saying, a few days beforehand, I had seen him. You know, the man in yellow. You see, I’d been out in the garden when I’d seen this person wearing a yellow raincoat head over to the top of the cliff.’

  ‘Was it raining at the time?’ Richard asked.

  Claire thought for a moment before answering. ‘It had been. That’s why I went out into the garden. It always smells so nice after a rainfall. But I think that’s why I noticed him. I thought it was odd he’d still be wearing his yellow raincoat.’

  ‘And did this happen three days before your sister died by any chance?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Claire said. ‘I suppose it was. But I saw him head down the cliff steps wearing a yellow coat. If it was a man of course. I still can’t say for sure if it was a man or a woman. But the point is, later on that morning, when I saw Polly, I mentioned to her that I’d seen this person in a yellow raincoat near the cliff steps, and she looked really panicked and told me that he was a bad man and I was to stay away from him.’