Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Really?’ Richard asked, sceptically.

  ‘And I’m not joking when I say Polly looked frightened. She had this look on her face that said this person was really bad news. I guessed it was someone connected with her drugs somehow. And that’s the reason why I mentioned him after Polly died. Seeing as Polly herself was frightened of this man, and he’d been hanging around only a few days before, I wanted you to know about him.’

  ‘Which you did, but in a way which has seriously wasted police time,’ Richard said, having difficulty keeping a lid on his anger.

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth from the start.’

  Richard went for a wander around the room. He was furious with Claire for having lied to them, but he tucked his personal feelings away so he could concentrate on the one issue that really mattered. Why had Claire said she’d seen someone on the cliff steps beforehand only to change her story? Was she even telling the truth now? What if the fabled ‘Man in Yellow’ had been on the cliff steps just before the murder, but he’d since got to Claire and put pressure on her to change her story?

  Mind you, Richard had to concede to himself, it didn’t much matter how much Claire changed her story—or how guilty she now looked—she was the only person at the house that day who couldn’t have killed Polly. Not seeing as Polly had been knocked to her death from partway down a staircase Claire couldn’t have possibly got down.

  However, even though Claire still couldn’t have been the killer, Richard knew that someone had killed Polly Carter. But who was it?

  Chapter 14

  Richard had been standing at the whiteboard without moving for nearly fifteen minutes, and Fidel had come to the conclusion that maybe his boss had fallen asleep standing up like a cow. As for Camille and Dwayne, they were also exchanging worried glances.

  Camille scraped her chair back and joined her boss at the board.

  ‘Sir, are you okay?’ she asked.

  And still Richard didn’t move—or acknowledge Camille’s presence in any way. He just looked at the dry-erase ink on the rickety whiteboard.

  ‘Sir?’

  Richard turned to Camille as though he’d only just realised he was in a police station.

  ‘Who killed Polly Carter, Camille?’

  ‘Well it’s not hard,’ Dwayne said, as he came over to join his boss and Camille. ‘It’s one of those people on the board.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ Richard said sarcastically, and Dwayne looked hurt. After all, he’d only been trying to help.

  ‘Although,’ Camille said, her brow creasing with thought, ‘we’ve got too many names up there, haven’t we?’

  Richard turned to Camille. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, for example, it doesn’t matter that Alain was having an affair—or lied to us about where he was at the time of the murder. We now know he was at the airport buying airline tickets when Polly was murdered—so he can’t be our killer.’

  As she said this, Camille picked up the board cloth and wiped out all the information they’d collected on Alain Moreau.

  Richard’s mouth opened in shock. What had Camille just done?

  ‘And the same is true for both Claire and Sophie,’ Camille continued. ‘Sophie was in the garden when Polly was pushed from the cliff, so we know she’s not the killer, either.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said hastily, ‘but it doesn’t mean her name gets wiped from the board.’

  Camille ignored her boss and wiped Sophie’s name from the board before she then hovered the cloth over Claire’s name.

  ‘And as for Claire, just how do you think she got down those steps to commit murder?’

  Richard’s hand grabbed Camille’s wrist to stop her wiping the board any further.

  ‘But she’s the victim’s sister, we can’t possibly remove her from the board.’

  ‘We can.’

  ‘We can’t, Camille.’

  ‘But I can,’ Dwayne said, as he, grabbed the cloth from Camille’s hand and wiped Claire’s name from the board.

  Richard turned to Dwayne, took the cloth from his hand, went over to his desk and slammed the offending item in the desk’s top drawer—before very carefully pulling out a bunch of keys from his pocket, choosing a tiny key from the fob and then locking the drawer shut. There, he seemed to be saying to his team as he looked at them. That was the end of that particular madness.

  Dwayne licked the palm of his hand and wiped out all the information on the whiteboard they had on Luc Pichou.

  ‘And I don’t have Luc down as a killer, either, Chief. I’ve known him my whole life and he’s only ever been a small-time pusher.’

  ‘Dwayne’s got a point, sir,’ Fidel said from his desk, half rising out of his chair as he did so.

  Richard turned very slowly and gave Fidel a hard stare.

  ‘Et tu, Fidel?’ he said.

  Fidel sank back to his seat, suitably chastised.

  ‘Go on, Fidel,’ Camille said.

  Looking desperately conflicted, Fidel looked from Richard to Camille. And then from Camille back to Richard.

  ‘Oh all right, then!’ Richard said in exasperation. ‘What were you going to say?’

  ‘Well, it was just, if Luc is the killer, then I don’t think he’d have left a coat covered in his fingerprints in the smugglers’ tunnel.’

  ‘Good point,’ Camille said, turning to her boss. ‘Don’t you think, sir?’

  ‘Yes. All right. I can see that,’ Richard said in a tone of voice that made it sound as though there were in fact no areas of agreement between himself and Fidel.

  ‘So that leaves us with only three people who could have been on the cliff steps to kill Polly,’ Camille said, pointing at the names that remained on the whiteboard. ‘Polly’s agent, Max Brandon. The film director, Phil Adams. And Juliette Moreau, the wife of the man Polly was having her affair with. It’s one of those three people who killed Polly Carter.’

  Despite his team’s cavalier attitude to the whiteboard, Richard had to admit that he could see the logic of what Camille was saying. They’d not found a single person who’d seen Juliette out on her run—so she still didn’t have a decent alibi—and it wouldn’t have been possible for both Max and Phil to have been seen standing at an upstairs window, seeing as Sophie only saw one person at the upstairs window. In fact, Richard realised, if they could just work out exactly who it was that Sophie had seen, then maybe it would get their list of remaining suspects from three people down to two. But how to do it, that was the question? Maybe he should get the witnesses to stage a re-enactment?

  And with that thought, Richard had a sudden insight about how he could perhaps get his parents back together again. Because Catherine had been right. He should try and trick them—and maybe the best way to do that would be to stage a scene. But how to do it, that was the question?

  Richard went over to his desk and for the next two hours got stuck into solving his problem. His team left him alone—presuming he was working hard on the Polly Carter Case.

  They were wrong.

  And when, later on, Richard announced that he had to go up to Government House to see the Commissioner of Police, his team continued to presume that he was still working on Polly Carter’s case.

  And they were still wrong.

  The following day, Richard convened his team at Polly’s house to re-enact the moments immediately before the murder. Richard was even pleased, for once, to see that it was going to be another day of blistering heat and blue skies. The sunshine and light bouncing off the house would be similar to how it had been at the time of the murder.

  Richard sent Camille off with Claire to the top of the cliffs—to the exact spot where Claire said she’d been positioned when Polly had been killed. As for Max, he was inside the house standing by the window of the upstairs landing where he said he’d been standing at the time of the murder—and Fidel stood a few steps behind Max holding a walkie-talkie for when Richard needed to communicate with hi
m. As for Phil, he was in his bedroom in the next door room also standing at the window—again, as he said he’d been on the morning of the murder—with Dwayne standing by for assistance as required.

  As for Richard, he was out in the middle of the lawn with Sophie.

  ‘And this was where you were standing?’ Richard asked. ‘I think so,’ Sophie said. ‘It was about here.’

  ‘But this is critically important, Sophie. As far as angles go—and the light reflecting on windows, and so on and so forth—it’s vital you stand as close to where you think you were when you heard Polly scream.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was in this general area, but I don’t know if I was five feet this way or ten feet that way. But it must have been about here because although I heard Polly scream, I couldn’t see Claire on the other side of the shrubs just there.’ Here, Sophie pointed at the bank of bushes and shrubs in the large bed that separated the main garden from the cliff top. ‘So yes, I suppose I must have been here or hereabouts. I think.’

  ‘Okay,’ Richard said. ‘Thank you for trying.’

  Richard pulled out the police walkie-talkie that was clipped to the belt of his trousers and, as ever when he had to use a walkie-talkie, there was a part of him which reverted to being ten years old—which had been the age he’d been when he received his very first toy walkie-talkie set. It had been his most prized Christmas present that year: two plastic walkie-talkies in deep army green—both with incongruously bright orange buttons on them for tapping out Morse Code—and five metres of white twisted electrical cable joining the two units together. Richard had spent that Christmas holidays in a state of bliss setting up one walkie-talkie in his bedroom with the cable going out of his window and down through the window beneath to the other walkie-talkie unit that he’d placed behind the sofa in the sitting room.

  As an only child, Richard didn’t of course have anyone to talk to through his walkie-talkie, so half the time he’d sit in his bedroom with the walkie-talkie to his mouth passing on crucial information about the criminals, spies and cutthroats that operated in his parents’ cul-de-sac; and, the other half of the time, he hid behind the sofa downstairs with the walkie-talkie clamped to his ear, writing down the descriptions of vice and depravity that he remembered describing when he’d been talking into the other end.

  Now, as Richard pressed the push-to-talk button on the police unit, he got his usual frisson of excitement that he was using a walkie-talkie that not only didn’t have wire running between the two units, but it also had a real living human being at the other end of it to talk to.

  ‘Romeo Papa to Foxtrot Bravo,’ he said. ‘Is Mr Brandon in position?’

  After a moment, Fidel’s voice crackled out of the speaker. ‘What’s that, sir?’

  Richard hadn’t really expected any of his team to embrace the NATO-approved phonetic alphabet, but he wasn’t going to drop his standards just because they didn’t have any.

  ‘Foxtrot Bravo, is Mr Brandon in position?’

  ‘Oh you mean me,’ Fidel said. ‘Yes. He says he is, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then, Delta Mike, is Mr Adams in position?’

  ‘Sure is, Chief,’ Dwayne Myers said over the circuit, unable to hide the smile in his voice.

  ‘Very good, then I’ll ask the witness to turn around and start looking back at the house now. Over.’ Richard effortlessly slotted the walkie-talkie back onto his belt. ‘Okay, Sophie. If you’d turn back to look at the house and let’s see which of the two witnesses we can see.’

  Standing side by side, Richard and Sophie looked back at the house, and it was instantly apparent why Sophie hadn’t quite known what she had seen that morning. There was a glare of reflected sunlight blasting from all of the upstairs windows—especially from the landing window that Richard guessed Max was standing behind. But as Richard looked along the first floor, he reached the last window and was surprised.

  There was no glare from that window at all.

  And, in fact, as Richard continued to look, he was pretty sure he could see the dim figure of Phil standing behind it. Richard plucked the walkie-talkie from his belt.

  ‘Delta Mike, this is Romeo Papa. Could you get Phil Adams to wave his arms?’ he said into it.

  ‘Sure thing, Chief.’

  A moment later, Richard and Sophie both saw the darkened figure in the window lift his arms and wave them from side to side.

  ‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘That must have been the window I saw the person in. I mean, all of the other windows are just sunshine.’

  Richard had already come to the same conclusion. So Richard walked another ten paces nearer the house. It was just the same glare. So he walked a few paces off to the left—and to the right—and back and forth—and all Richard ever got was the same reflected sunlight from every window of the house apart from Phil’s.

  Richard spoke into his walkie-talkie again.

  ‘Foxtrot Bravo, Romeo Papa here. Could you ask Mr Brandon to come closer to his window—and maybe even to wave his arms as well.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Fidel said.

  Richard and Sophie still couldn’t make out any sign of Max Brandon standing behind his window. Therefore, Richard realised in mounting excitement, it couldn’t have been Max Brandon who Sophie saw at the upstairs window that morning. It could only have been Phil Adams!

  Once they’d returned to the police station, Camille wiped Phil Adams’s name from the board as she announced, ‘So, sir, seeing as it could only have been Phil Adams Sophie saw at the window, we know he’s not our killer.’

  Camille looked over to see what Richard thought of this sweeping statement, but she could see that he’d gone straight to his desk and was checking his computer.

  ‘I agree,’ Fidel said. ‘Which means we’re left with one of Max Brandon or Juliette Moreau being our killer.’

  ‘And they both have reasons to want Polly Carter dead,’ Camille said, still surprised that her boss hadn’t tried to stop their theorising.

  ‘My money’s on Juliette,’ Dwayne said. ‘She’s been lying to us from the start, she plants surveillance bugs, and—most suspicious of all if you ask me—she’s training for a triathlon. I mean, you can’t do that level of physical exercise without having deep psychological problems.’

  Now it was Dwayne’s turn to notice that his boss wasn’t listening.

  ‘I’m not sure I agree,’ Fidel said. ‘Because I know she’s been lying to us, but you don’t kill the person your husband is having an affair with, do you? You kill your husband. I mean, he’s the one who’s betrayed Juliette. Not Polly. After all, Polly’s a single woman, she’s allowed to sleep with whoever she likes, isn’t she? So, as I say,’ Fidel concluded, only now realising that he’d never been allowed such a long period of air-time to discuss one of his theories before, ‘I could imagine Juliette killing Alain, but I don’t see why she’d kill Polly Carter.’

  And now everyone was looking over and seeing that Richard was apparently oblivious to them all. Camille held up a finger to Fidel and Dwayne to be quiet. She knew how to get her boss’s attention.

  ‘And you know what I want to know? How come we found Claire’s mobile phone in the chandelier afterwards? That’s what keeps bugging me.’

  Still nothing from Richard.

  ‘But if you want to know about that,’ Dwayne offered, ‘what I want to know is, seeing as Polly bought ten thousand dollars of heroin three days before she died, where is it now?’

  ‘Yes, very good, team,’ Richard said, standing up from his desk. ‘I’m not actually invisible, you know.’

  ‘Just checking you were still with us, sir,’ Camille said with a fake smile of support.

  ‘Oh don’t worry, you can’t get rid of me that easily. But if you must know, I’ve just received a message that means I’m going to need some help.’

  Richard’s team shared glances. Their boss was asking for help?

  ‘In particular, I think I’m going to need your help, Dwayne.’
r />   Everyone slowly turned and looked at Dwayne.

  ‘You are?’ Dwayne said, uneasily.

  ‘You see,’ Richard said before he lost his nerve, ‘I understand you have a number of girlfriends on the go at the same time.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I understand you have a number of girlfriends on the go.’

  Dwayne was affronted, and pulled his trousers up as he said, ‘I’ve been dating for many years, Chief, and no one has ever been able to prove I’ve had more than one woman on the go at any one time.’

  ‘But we all know you have more than one woman on the go at any one time.’

  ‘Ah yes, you may know that, Chief, but the point is, none of the women do.’

  ‘But tell me, are you currently in a one girlfriend situation, a none girlfriend situation, or perhaps … more than one?’

  Dwayne narrowed his eyes. ‘Depends who’s asking.’

  ‘Because if you’ve got more than one girlfriend on the go, there’s something I’d like to ask of you.’

  ‘What’s that? You want … what? A double date?’

  ‘God no!’ Richard said, horrified. ‘But I would like you to take a bullet for the team. Or rather, for me.’

  ‘How can I take a bullet for the team? I’m not really understanding what you’re saying, Chief.’

  ‘Very well, then, first of all I’d like you to text my mother and say you want to meet her for a drink tonight.’

  ‘Woah woah woah,’ Dwayne said, holding his hands up for Richard to stop talking right there. ‘You want me to have a drink with your mother tonight?’

  ‘And not just a drink, I’d like you to imply that you and her are going on a date.’

  ‘You want me to date your mother?’

  ‘In fact, I want you to arrange to meet her in Catherine’s bar tonight at 7pm sharp,’ Richard said.