As Richard said this, he looked at Sophie, and everyone could see that although she was trying not to give anything away, her eyes were glistening with tears. What Richard was saying was hitting home.
‘I can well imagine how exciting it must have been, hanging out with a world-famous supermodel. Smoking drugs together. But you had no idea how destructive Polly was at that time—and you definitely had no idea that the spliffs she was offering you were laced with heroin, did you?
‘And by the time you found out the truth, it was too late. You had heroin in your system. You wanted more. And I bet Polly was delighted to give it to you. After all, as Claire told us, Polly was trying to destroy herself following her mother’s death, and she wanted as many people to go down with her as possible.
‘We can only guess how Sophie felt when she returned to the UK. A heroin addict. That’s why she ended up stealing from her clients. She needed the extra money to fund her addiction. And although she was forced into admitting that her client left out bait money to catch a member of staff who’d been stealing cash, what Sophie didn’t tell us was that the member of staff they needed to catch was her. After all,’ Richard said, turning to the room, ‘seeing as Claire isn’t a heroin addict—but we just found the missing heroin packed in her wheelchair—who else would have hidden it there knowing they could get it out again once they were back in the UK if not Sophie?’
Richard turned back to face Sophie. ‘And we’ll know you’re a heroin addict—and that Claire is clean—when we test samples of hair from you both. It’s really going to be very easy to prove that it was you who put the heroin in Claire’s wheelchair.’
A sob caught in Sophie’s throat as Richard said this, but he didn’t drop eye contact with her.
‘The anger you’ve felt for Polly over this last year has grown like a cancer inside you, hasn’t it? Because, although you told us you were glad to end your job as a private nurse to the wealthy, I think the opposite is true. After all, you’d been doing your job for over a decade and a half, and there’d never been a single complaint against your name in all that time. I think that was because you took pride in your job. In fact, you loved it, didn’t you? And who wouldn’t? Living in fine houses, eating only the best food—and travelling the world first class. It’s been the high life for you these last fifteen years, but, because of what Polly did to you, you lost access to it all.
‘And then, when you got a call from your old agency saying Claire wanted you to accompany her to Saint-Marie again, you jumped at the chance. Did you come to the island specifically to murder Polly Carter? We’ll never know, but I imagine that nothing prepared you for the fact that when you finally met up with Polly after a year in which you’d become a thieving addict who’d lost your dream job, you found a woman who was now at peace, in love, and clean of the very drugs she’d blighted your life with. Because when you asked to score some heroin from her, she didn’t have any, did she? Of course she didn’t. She’d been clean of drugs since she returned from rehab in Los Angeles.
‘And I reckon it was then that she told you her story. Of how she’d fallen in love with Alain. How she’d finally stopped using. And how she wanted to make amends to her sister, Claire. But none of this helped you. You needed heroin and you knew who had to get it for you. The woman who’d made you an addict in the first place.
‘And I bet Polly didn’t want to help you. After all, we know she’d already tipped off Phil’s studio about his drugs use. But then, Polly hadn’t caused Phil’s drug addiction, had she? Whereas she was squarely to blame for yours, as I’m sure you made very clear to her. And I bet you were able to make her feel truly terrible about what she’d done to you. You maybe even blackmailed her, threatening to tell Alain about how she’d destroyed your life with heroin if she didn’t get you the drugs you needed. But either way, you bullied and cajoled Polly until she accepted that it was her responsibility to sort you out with your next fix. And foolish, trusting, Polly, she got you the heroin you wanted.
‘That’s right,’ Richard said to the room. ‘Polly really was trying to make amends before she started her new life back in the UK with Alain. And although she hoped that this grand gesture—buying a vast quantity of heroin—went some way to clearing her debt with Sophie, she had no idea that it didn’t even come close as far as Sophie was concerned. Because, by now, Sophie had murder in her heart. In fact, the way I think Sophie saw it was, Polly had tricked her into destroying her life, so now she was going to trick Polly into destroying her life.’
‘But you don’t understand,’ Max said, unable to keep quiet any longer. ‘Whether or not what you’re saying is true, there’s no way Sophie could have been on the steps to push Polly to her death. I was looking at her from the upstairs window of the house with my own eyes.’
‘That’s right, Max. And I’m sorry I ever doubted you.’
‘And I could see Sophie as well when Polly was killed,’ Phil agreed.
‘And how clever Sophie’s been,’ Richard said, ‘making sure we never quite managed to pin down who she was looking at at the time of the murder. Because, as long as we continued to question who she was looking at, we would always be presuming she couldn’t be the killer because she was so clearly on the lawn at the time of the murder.’
‘But she was!’ Max said.
‘But she wasn’t,’ Richard said, ‘because that’s not when Polly Carter was killed,’ Richard said. ‘Isn’t that right, Sophie?’
Richard said this directly at Sophie. And, as though on cue, a fat tear rolled down her cheek.
‘Because, when Polly told you about how she wanted to make amends with Claire, I think she mentioned to you that she believed that Claire suffered from conversion disorder, didn’t she? And, as Claire’s nurse, you realised that you were in a unique position to fan the flames of this mistaken belief. So you told Polly that, in your professional opinion—as a trained nurse—you also had your suspicions that Claire was faking her injuries. And I bet Polly lapped it up. After all, if Claire could walk again, then Polly could stop feeling so guilty about causing her disability. In fact, I bet she clung to the lies you told her like a survivor from a shipwreck clinging to a life raft.’
Richard turned to Claire.
‘That’s what Polly was referring to when she told you she had a gift for you. She thought she was about to return the power of walking to you. By giving you a shock so great that it would breach your psychological defences and force you to get out of your wheelchair. That’s why she took you off to the cliff tops that morning—and started an argument out of thin air—and then threatened to commit suicide—it was because she wanted to get you into a fever pitch of emotion where you’d step out of your wheelchair to save her.’
Richard turned and looked at all of Polly’s friends in the room.
‘It’s like you’ve all been saying all along. Polly really was very easy to manipulate, and she was a terrible judge of character. The reason why she died was because she allowed herself to trust Sophie here.
‘But it finally explains why we found Claire’s mobile phone in the chandelier up there with Polly’s fingerprints on it,’ Richard said, indicating the chandelier above their heads. ‘She couldn’t have Claire phoning for an ambulance when she pulled off her trick. There couldn’t be any safety net. And that’s also why she chose to put it in a chandelier of all places. It was Polly’s little joke. Because as far as Polly was concerned, once Claire had got down the cliff steps and discovered that she wasn’t dead after all, she thought that she and Claire would walk back to the house together and Claire would be able to reach up to the chandelier and get the phone back for herself.
‘But that’s not what happened, because she didn’t know that although Polly was trying to trick her sister, Sophie had plans to double-cross Polly. And this is how she did it.
‘After Polly ran down the steps of the cliff and disappeared around the first bend, she let out an ear-piercing scream as though she were plummeting to h
er death. This was all part of the plan Sophie had got her to agree to. Polly then ran down the remainder of the steps and threw herself to the sand to make it look as though she had indeed just fallen to her death from the cliff. I’m sure that Sophie impressed on Polly the need to make the illusion of death look flawless if they were going to smash down Claire’s psychological barriers to walking.
‘But this explains why, when I first asked Sophie about the gash in Polly’s arm, she didn’t know about it. After all, when Sophie first got down to the beach and turned Polly’s body over, Polly wasn’t in any way hurt, she was only play-acting dead.
‘But it meant that Polly played straight into your hands, Sophie. Didn’t she? Because now you had at least one witness—Claire—who would swear blind in a court of law that Polly jumped to her death before you’d even arrived on the scene.
‘But what you knew—and Polly didn’t—was, Claire didn’t suffer from conversion disorder. Did she? So she couldn’t run after her sister to stop her even if she’d wanted to. Or go down the steps of the cliff to investigate.
‘So, once you were down on the beach with Polly’s apparently dead body, you then called up to Claire and told her to get an ambulance, knowing that, because she didn’t have her mobile on her, she’d have to wheel herself back to the house to make the call. At which point, I imagine Polly finally opened her eyes. Maybe she was even disappointed that you had told Claire to go off to phone for an ambulance. After all, Polly was in no way injured, it would surely be taking the trick too far to have an ambulance arrive at the house.
‘And so, I imagine the pair of you returned back up the cliff steps together. To stop Claire from making the call, perhaps—or to confess to Claire that it had all been a prank that hadn’t worked—we won’t know exactly, but this is when the murder actually happened.’
Richard turned to Sophie before continuing.
‘I wonder what mood Polly was in on her final ascent back up the cliff stairs. Upset, I’d imagine, that her trick hadn’t worked on her sister as you’d said it would. But as Polly approached the last bend in the staircase before she got to the top, she still had no idea that rather than her having manipulated her sister, it had been you who’d been manipulating her into making it look like she’d committed suicide while you had an alibi elsewhere in the garden.
‘And the final genius of your plan was, although it had required a number of key events to go your way up to this point, you hadn’t actually committed any kind of a crime yet. Although that was about to change. And for the murder itself you needed no real planning or finesse at all. You just needed a big stick and an unsuspecting victim.
‘So, just before Polly turned for the last flight of steps at the top of the cliff, you picked up the piece of driftwood you’d placed there earlier and smashed it into Polly’s head, trying to knock her over the edge of the steps so that this time she’d fall to her death for real.
‘But Polly fought back, didn’t she? Even if only briefly, she was able to grab at the branch with her hands. There was a tussle—which you won—and about the only mistake you made was to not notice that Polly had gashed her inner forearm as she finally lost her grip on the branch. But you did it. You got your revenge. You killed the woman who’d made you an addict. Who’d ruined your life.
‘And, with Polly now dead for real, you then rushed down the steps and hid the branch in a bush—although you didn’t have enough time to notice that the branch now had a smear of Polly’s blood on it—before you carried on down to the beach and made sure you were found waiting by the body of Polly when Claire and Max returned to the scene having called for an ambulance a few minutes later.’
Richard turned to look directly at Sophie.
‘And how clever you were, because what did Claire see when she got back to the scene? She saw her sister Polly lying dead on the beach—just as she expected to see. And she saw her nurse standing at her sister’s side—just as she expected to see. But this time, Polly really was dead.’
As Richard finished his story, Sophie’s body bent over in her chair and great racking sobs of grief and remorse heaved through her.
‘Dwayne,’ Richard said calmly. ‘If you would?’
Wails of pain emitted from Sophie as Dwayne fastened the handcuffs to her wrists and led her from the room, but all the other witnesses watched on, stony-faced.
With Sophie gone, the remaining witnesses turned, one by one, and looked at Richard in wonder.
‘Thank you,’ Claire said, speaking on behalf of all of them.
Richard didn’t need to say anything in reply. He’d avenged Polly Carter’s death, and the witnesses’ looks of gratitude were all the thanks he needed.
Later on that afternoon, Sophie was in the cells, having made a teary, confused, but—most importantly of all—admissible confession of murder, Camille was at her desk scanning the confession into the main police computer, Dwayne was finishing writing out the log sheets for the arrest and Fidel was bagging the heroin for sending off-island for analysis by the labs on Guadeloupe. And while they were all doing this, Richard stood in front of the whiteboard with the cloth in his hand. He’d rubbed off all the remaining names and information they’d had up there—and now all that was left was the name of the victim, Polly Carter.
Richard realised that when he’d started investigating the case, he’d presumed that Polly Carter was going to be a vacuous and air-headed idiot. But he’d been wrong. There was something about her desperate and ultimately doomed lifelong attempt to find peace for herself, and love from her family, that had touched him deeply.
Richard wiped the name ‘Polly Carter’ from the board, and she was gone.
He put the cloth down.
‘Well, I hear congratulations are in order,’ a voice said from the doorway of the police station.
Richard turned and saw that his father had entered wearing khaki slacks and a bright red polo shirt. Jennifer stepped into the station just to her husband’s side, a shy smile on her face.
‘Selwyn just phoned to say you caught Polly Carter’s killer,’ Graham said, easing himself down proprietorially on the corner of Dwayne’s desk. ‘And he also said it was one of the most brilliant pieces of detecting he’s ever seen.’
‘He said that?’ Richard said, thrilled.
‘But I’m sorry to say I had to disagree with him.’
There was a sharp intake of breath from Camille, but Richard somehow wasn’t surprised. Of course his father disagreed. He disagreed with everything he did.
‘You see,’ Graham said, ‘I had to disagree with him because, as far as I can see, every time my son does any detecting, it’s brilliant.’
After a moment of startled incomprehension, Richard found fireworks of joy exploding in front of his eyes. Had his father just paid him a compliment? After all these years, had Graham Poole, one-time Superintendent of the Leicestershire Police Force, current President of the Oadby Rotary Club, Secretary of the Newton Harcourt golf club, and senior Sidesman at St James-The-Less, just paid him an actual, real, spoken-out-loud-in-front-of-witnesses compliment?
As Dwayne, Camille and Fidel’s faces all warmed into wide smiles, Richard—now suddenly panicked that his father would realise he’d made a mistake and retract what he’d just said—broke in with, ‘So what about last night? How was the dinner at the British Embassy?’
Jennifer’s eyes sparkled as she said, ‘Well! I sat next to the Ambassador himself. And then, afterwards, there was a recital from a local band who are apparently very popular—and the whole thing finished with coffee and rum on the roof of the residence watching shooting stars in the night sky. It was magical!’
Richard’s team could see how happy Jennifer was, and their smiles widened.
‘Anyway,’ Graham said, ‘we don’t want to interrupt your well-earned celebrations, but could I have a quick word with you, Richard? Perhaps outside on the verandah?’
Richard straightened his tie and pretended he wasn’t instantly
nervous.
‘Okay,’ he said.
Graham led out to the verandah and Richard followed his father, unable to catch his mother’s eye as he went. What had he done wrong now?
Stepping out into the heat of the late afternoon sun, Richard’s suit immediately started to prickle on his body, but he didn’t want his father to know how uncomfortable he felt—either physically or emotionally.
For his part, Graham seemed content to lean on the balustrade and look out at the view.
‘So, how’s the conference going?’ Richard said, in lieu of understanding what was going on.
‘There’s no conference,’ Graham said without even turning around to look at his son.
‘But there must be,’ Richard said, unable to keep the note of desperation out of his voice. ‘You know, if the Commissioner invited you over to speak at a conference. Or why would he have invited you?’
Graham turned to look at his son, and Richard was puzzled to see only tiredness in his father’s eyes.
‘The whole conference was a con trick to get me out here so I could hook up again with your mother. As I told the Commissioner after the evening finished last night. Don’t worry, though, I thanked him for the invite, but I said that now I was out here, there was no need to go on with the charade.’
‘You told the Commissioner you knew there was no conference?’
‘I did.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
‘I’m glad to say he respected me enough to admit I was right. And he even told me that he only invited me out here because you asked him to.’
Richard’s heart sank, and he felt a trickle of sweat slip down his forehead onto his cheek that he didn’t dare wipe off.
‘It’s true,’ Richard said, ashamed—of course—but also knowing that he couldn’t lie to his father.
Graham let out a throaty chuckle.
‘No need to beat yourself up about it. I’m glad you did.’
Richard frowned, sure that his ears must have deceived him.
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