Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘After all, who was the only person that morning who could have known in advance that Polly was about to invite Claire for a walk? Well—logically—the only person who knew for sure that Polly was about to ask Claire to go for a walk that morning was Polly herself. And the only person in the house that day who could have known for sure that Polly was about to commit suicide—before running down the steps of the cliff to do just that—was Polly as well.’

  ‘Then it was suicide?’ Alain said, confused.

  ‘Oh no, it was murder,’ Richard said, warming to his theme. ‘But I’m just pointing out that it was Polly who took Claire into the garden. Just as it was Polly who started up an argument with her once they were in the garden. Just as it was Polly who announced out of the blue that she was about to commit suicide. And it was Polly who put Claire’s phone in the chandelier.’

  ‘Listen,’ Max interrupted. ‘Could you just tell us who killed her?’

  ‘You want answers?’ Richard replied. ‘Very well, then, Claire, can I ask you something?’

  Claire looked at Richard, but the look was guarded, as though she were holding something back.

  ‘As we all know, you lost the power of your legs in your riding accident ten years ago. Didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Claire said, worried.

  ‘And your GP’s made it clear to us that you don’t suffer from conversion disorder.’

  ‘As you’ve already said once,’ Claire said, tartly.

  ‘Then, I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but could I ask if you could get from your wheelchair and onto this sofa here?’

  As Richard said this, he pointed at a battered old sofa that was near to Claire’s side.

  Claire looked affronted. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I just wondered if you’d be able to vacate your wheelchair and get onto the sofa here?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you could just do as I ask and all will become clear.’

  Claire still looked affronted, but Sophie half rose from her chair.

  ‘I can help,’ she said.

  ‘There’s no need, Sophie,’ Richard said. ‘I’m sure Claire can manage.’

  Claire looked from Sophie to Richard. She then manoeuvred her wheelchair so that it was at ninety degrees to one of the armrests of the sofa and then clicked on the brake. She then—rather expertly, Richard had to note—put both hands on the corner of the sofa’s armrest, and used it as a pivot so she could quickly swing herself onto the tatty cushions.

  Once there, she looked up at Richard defiantly. ‘Okay?’

  Richard seemed entirely unbothered as he went over to inspect the wheelchair.

  ‘You see,’ he said. ‘All along there’s been a paradox at the heart of this case that I’ve not been able to solve. And that’s the question of why Polly, a woman who was found with no drugs in her system, ordered ten thousand dollars of heroin three days before she was killed. I mean, it doesn’t even begin to make sense, does it? But then, nor does it seem likely that a heroin addict would manage to kick her addiction only to be murdered a few months later. I mean, talk about bad luck! Common sense says that—somehow—her drugs use has to be related to her murder, doesn’t it? And you know what? That’s exactly right. Polly’s heroin use was at the very heart of why she was murdered, as I think I’m about to prove.’

  As Richard said this he picked the wheelchair up by its back wheels and turned it upside down so that its four wheels were now pointing up in the air. Before anyone could say anything, he then reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a brand new Leatherman Wingman Multi-Tool, and looked dead-eyed at Camille as he expertly flipped it open like a butterfly knife to reveal a rather natty set of pliers. Camille raised an eyebrow, pretending to be impressed with Richard’s penknife savoir faire, but Richard had already turned his attention to the front left wheel of the wheelchair that he’d noticed hadn’t been turning properly the last few times he’d seen Claire. And, as he used the pliers to unscrew the little wheel’s restraining bolt, he carried on speaking.

  ‘Because we know Polly bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin three days before she died, so another puzzle we’ve been trying to solve is, where on earth is it? After all, that’s a lot of heroin to suddenly vanish—and we’ve searched this house without finding it or any trace of it. And yet, although we’ve searched high and low for it, I finally realised that there was one place we’d never looked. And I’m sure I’m not the only person here who’s noticed that the front left wheel of Claire’s wheelchair has, of late, developed a surprising tendency to get stuck.’

  With a final grunt of effort, Richard managed to unscrew the little wheel from the wheelchair. He then he held it up to inspect the threads of the bolt that had affixed it to the chair.

  ‘Ah yes, well that would explain it. I think this wheel’s recently been removed and screwed back on—but it looks like it’s been cross-threaded. That would explain why it’s been out of kilter.’

  Putting the wheel to one side, Richard looked down into the hollow tube of the wheelchair frame. He then flipped his Leatherman around until he’d got up another tool with a hook on the end of a prong. As he reached into the hollow tube with it, he said, ‘You see, Luc here blew the case wide open—had we but known it at the time—when he pointed out that if Polly had been clean when she’d died, then who else might she have been buying the heroin for? And this is the important point, because—if it wasn’t for Juliette or Alain—then, considering how bulky that much heroin would have been, the person who Polly bought it for must have had a plan for smuggling the heroin off the island when they finally left Saint-Marie. And what better method for smuggling ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin through customs than inside the hollow frame of a wheelchair?’

  As Richard said this, he withdrew the hook out of the metal tube—and pulled a cellophane-wrapped tube of brown paste out of the metal tubing. When he’d got it free, it was possible to see that the tube of brown paste was about two feet long.

  ‘So, Claire,’ Richard said, ‘perhaps you’d like to tell us why there’s ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin hidden inside the frame of your wheelchair?’

  Chapter 16

  Claire looked at Richard, horrified. ‘I don’t know how that got there!’

  ‘Is that so? Because once I’d realised that Polly’s fingerprints were on the phone in the chandelier—and only Polly could have known that she was going to say she wanted to end her life that morning—I came to realise that there was one last aspect of the case I had yet to consider. And that was the fact that while Claire almost certainly had a motive to want Polly dead, Polly also had a motive to want her sister Claire dead.

  ‘I mean, look at it from Polly’s point of view. She was second born. She’d always known she wouldn’t inherit the family estate. Or the family money. It’s no wonder she spent her life trying and failing to find happiness. First through fame and notoriety, and, latterly, through her heroin addiction. And it couldn’t have helped her mental equilibrium when she then caused her older sister to lose the use of her legs—especially when her father died so soon afterwards after without having ever forgiven her for what she’d done. But then, nor had her mother forgiven her by the time she died last year, either. And we know how badly her mother’s death affected Polly, because it was soon after that she took an all-but fatal overdose of heroin.

  ‘And through all this time, I think Polly saw her older sister Claire get the love from her parents that she herself craved but, because of one silly mistake in the past—as she saw it—she was never going to get. In fact, as the years passed, it would only have been natural if Polly’s despair at ever being loved turned into hate—particularly when she started receiving anonymous death threats from her sister.

  ‘If that had been all Polly had been coping with at the time, I think she perhaps might have been able to manage, but it wasn’t long after the letters started to arrive that Polly also discovered that her agen
t Max had stolen pretty much the last fifty thousand dollars she had from her. As she admitted to Phil just before she died—and we’ve been able to prove since her death—Polly had no money, even after all her years of hard work. No pension. No savings. She’d spent it all. The future looked bleak for her.

  ‘And finally this brings us to the body that we found on the beach on the morning of the murder, because it just doesn’t seem likely that a heroin addict of many years’ standing—especially when she’d recently been buying heroin—would have no heroin in her system when she died, does it? So this is what I began to wonder. If there was no heroin in the body on the beach, then maybe the body on the beach didn’t belong to Polly Carter? And then, what I found myself remembering was, when I first met you, Claire, how much like your twin sister you looked.’

  There was general consternation in the room as Richard said this, with all of the witnesses trying to talk at once.

  ‘Wait wait wait,’ Phil finally said the loudest, his hands held up to silence everyone. ‘Are you suggesting that Polly swapped places with Claire before pushing Claire to her death and taking her place herself?’

  Richard looked at the room. ‘It would explain why Claire’s trying to smuggle ten thousand dollars’ worth of heroin out of the country. Claire isn’t Claire. She’s Polly—and, now she’s lost everything out here in the Caribbean, she wants to go back to Lincolnshire to claim the family farm and the family money that would always have been hers if only she’d been born a few seconds before her twin sister, rather than a few seconds afterwards.’

  ‘But we’d have recognised the swap!’ Max said.

  ‘I know you would, and that means that all of you must have been in on this from the start.’

  Juliette rose from her seat.

  ‘But why would we help her do that? I hated Polly Carter!’

  ‘And there you have me, Juliette!’ Richard replied. ‘Because I could perhaps imagine Phil or Alain maybe going through with the plan of pretending that the dead body of Claire belonged to Polly, but I can’t for the life of me work out why the rest of you would. It’s just asking too much of too disparate a group of people with so little in common.

  ‘And to show how ludicrous the idea of the two sisters swapping places really is, if they had swapped places—with all of you now covering up for the swap—the pathologist would surely have noticed that the body we sent him for analysis would have had evidence of serious historical fractures in the legs, pelvis and back—seeing as the body would have actually belonged to Claire and not Polly. But the pathologist found no historical damage to any of the bones, and so it couldn’t possibly have been Claire who fell to her death that day. It was indeed Polly.

  ‘And I tell you all this because you have to understand just how desperate I was before I got to the final answer!’ Here, Richard turned back to Claire.

  ‘Now, don’t worry, Claire, I know that you are Claire and not Polly, but you said that the night before your sister was killed, she “had a gift” for you. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what she told me.’

  ‘That’s right. It didn’t seem to ring true when you told us, because the next day Polly was back to being her usual sniping self with you, but I made myself consider, what if what she told you the night before was true? There was a gift she was planning to give you the following day.’

  ‘But how will we ever know what that gift was?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Well, I know, of course. And so does the killer. Isn’t that right, Sophie?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sophie said.

  ‘It was you who killed Polly Carter.’

  Everyone realised what Richard had just said, and they all slowly turned and looked in horror at Sophie.

  ‘What?’ Sophie eventually stammered.

  ‘You heard me. You killed Polly Carter.’

  ‘But that’s not possible,’ Phil said. ‘I was looking at Sophie when Polly was killed. She was on the lawn.’

  ‘I know,’ Richard said. ‘Clever, wasn’t she? Managing to be in two places at once. Although I should perhaps have known something was up when I first interviewed you all and Sophie said that while she inspected Polly’s body after she fell, she didn’t notice the deep gash on the inside of her right arm. After all, as a trained nurse, you’d expect her to notice that, don’t you think?’

  ‘But how did she kill her?’ Max asked, still trying to make sense of Richard’s announcement. ‘Seeing as she was on the lawn at the time?’

  ‘Oh that was easy to fathom once I’d worked out she had an accomplice.’

  This got everyone’s attention.

  ‘You don’t think it was me, do you?’ Claire eventually asked.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Richard said. ‘I know you’re entirely innocent and had nothing to do with your sister’s murder, Claire. In fact, Sophie’s accomplice isn’t in this room.’

  ‘Then who was it?’ Alain asked.

  ‘The last person you could possibly expect to be Sophie’s accomplice.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  ‘It was Polly herself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right. Polly colluded in her own murder. Unwittingly, of course. But remember what a terrible decision-maker everyone said Polly was,’ Richard said, pulling his little notebook out of his inside pocket as he spoke. ‘In fact, when we first interviewed you, Phil, you told us Polly “was a terrible judge of character and one of the easiest people in the world to manipulate. She was like a child when it came to money, so she’d give it away to any and every sob story that came along.” And, Claire, you yourself said your twin sister was “missing the part of her brain that ever thought of consequences”, and “she always fell in with the wrong crowd and allowed others to influence her”.’ As Richard flipped his notebook shut again, he said, ‘In this instance, the person who she allowed to influence her was you, Sophie.’

  Sophie was looking wired, panicked, and as though she could bolt at any moment. Dwayne and Fidel discreetly moved into position behind her.

  ‘And this is the tragedy of the case,’ Richard said, turning back to the room. ‘Because all along we’ve been trying to work out whether Polly had kicked her drugs—or if she was happy when she died—and I think that both these statements were true. As I think the state of her bedroom showed us, if only we’d thought it through properly at the time. Because someone who took pride in having a spotless bedroom was—I think—all the proof we needed that Polly was beginning to take back control in her life. Polly was happy when she died. She was clean of drugs.

  ‘And that was because of you, Alain. Because it’s like you’ve been saying all along. At Christmas last year, you fell for Polly. And she fell for you. And it was because of her love for you that she made herself go through with rehab and finally kick her drug habit. After all, you’d said she couldn’t have you unless she was clean.

  ‘But I think your effect on her runs even deeper than that. I think Polly spent her time in Rehab realising how badly she’d led her life up until she met you. And when she finally returned to Saint-Marie, she’d decided that changes had to be made. For starters, she wanted to make it up with you, Claire. After all, she’d already seen a mother and father die with their relationships with her in tatters, she didn’t want the same to happen to you. And I think that while she knew you’d been sending her the anonymous letters, she wanted to show you that she forgave you and that she’d changed.

  ‘And she really had changed. Max was right when he told us that Polly was happy before she died and wanted to retire to the countryside and have babies. That was her new plan. To lead a simpler life with Alain. To start a family with him. And to be reconciled with her sister. And, being the terrible judge of character we know her to be, I think she told Sophie all her plans, didn’t she?’

  ‘Why on earth would she tell my nurse any of this?’ Claire said imperiously. ‘She never told me!’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll discover that Sophie
and Polly knew each other far more than Sophie would ever want us to know. Isn’t that right, Sophie?’

  As Richard said this directly to Sophie, her gaze slipped away. She wasn’t saying.

  ‘But to go back to Polly’s state of mind just before she died, that’s why she was prepared to forgive you for stealing all that money from her bank account, Max. And even agree to let you take the money as a loan that you paid back when you could. You see, she’d learnt. Finally learnt. She didn’t need money to be happy.

  ‘And, I’m sorry to say, Phil, but it was also why she came down so hard on you when she discovered you were still using drugs yourself. She’d embraced her new drugs-free life with the passion of the recently converted, and she expected you to do the same. And we may agree that telling your movie company about your drugs use was naive at best—and a betrayal at worst—but I think she honestly thought she was helping you. After all, she might have had a new set of priorities in life, but she was still terrible at understanding the consequences of her actions. Which brings me rather neatly, though I say so myself, to why Sophie killed Polly.

  ‘And to understand that, we have to go back to last year, just after Polly and Claire’s mother had died, when Polly was at her most self-destructive—just before she took a near-fatal overdose of heroin. Claire, you told a story from that time of how Polly tried to get you to smoke a spliff that she’d secretly laced with heroin, but here’s what I should have noticed sooner: if she tried that trick on you, who else did she try the trick on?

  ‘Because, if Claire was here last year, we know her nurse came with her as well. Her agency nurse, Sophie Wessel. So, if Polly was so messed up last year that she’d offer a heroin spliff to her sister, I think she tried the exact same trick on Sophie as well. And although Claire didn’t fall for it, Sophie wasn’t so lucky. Were you?’