Killing Of Polly Carter

by Robert Thorogood

  Admittedly, he’d collected empirical evidence that suggested that Saint-Marie was a popular holiday destination for tens of thousands of other people, but what did other people know? This was an island where it was sunny every second of every single day apart from the ten minutes each morning and night when a tropical storm would appear out of nowhere and rain hard enough to flatten cows. And that wasn’t even counting the three months of the year when it was no longer the hot season because it was now the hurricane season—which, in truth, was just as hot as the hot season, but altogether more hurricaney.

  And none of this even included the constant and unrelenting humidity, which—Richard often found himself claiming—was well over one hundred per cent. (Of course, Richard knew that this was scientifically impossible, but he also knew that the one time he’d received a precious box of Walker’s crisps in the post from his mother, the crisps had gone soggy within minutes of him opening any of the packets. It was like some exquisite punishment that had been specifically designed to torture him. The insides of each packet contained perfect crisps right up to but not including the precise moment he opened the packet and tried to eat one, at which point they immediately went stale in the sultry tropical air.)

  This and other wild roller coasters of despair looped through Richard’s mind as he lay in bed, wide awake, his bedside alarm clock clicking from 04:18 to 04:19, surely the most miserable minute in the twenty-four hour clock, Richard found himself musing.

  A slick of sweat slipped down his neck and into the collar of his Marks and Spencer pyjamas, and before he could stop himself, Richard became a kicking machine, scissoring his legs in a frenzied attack on his sheets until they’d been balled up and dashed to the floor.

  He slumped back onto the old mattress and exhaled in exasperation. Why did everything have to be so hard?

  There was nothing for it, he might as well get up.

  He turned on the lights and padded into the tiny kitchenette and washroom that had somehow been crammed into the inside porch of his shack as if by someone who no doubt felt that the galley kitchens on sailboats were altogether too roomy. Surely there was a way of packing even more cooking and cleaning equipment into even less space?

  He went to the metal sink that was squashed in between his fridge and his front door, and discovered that he wasn’t the only person looking for a drink. A bright green lizard was already in the sink catching drops of water as they fell from the tap above.

  The lizard was called Harry. Or, rather, Richard had named the lizard Harry when he’d discovered that the shack he’d been assigned to live in already came with a reptilian sitting tenant. And, like every flat-share Richard had ever been involved in, it had been a disaster from the start.

  As Harry turned his attention back to catching drops of water with his pink-flashing tongue, Richard found himself thinking—not for the first time—that he should just get rid of the bloody creature.

  But how to do it, that was the question.

  A few hours later, Richard was sitting behind his desk in Honoré Police Station using the internet to research legal and possibly not-so-legal methods of household pest control when Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey swished over to his desk, a gleam in her eye.

  ‘So tell me … what do you want for lunch?’

  Camille was bright, lithe, and one of the most naturally attractive women on the island, but as Richard looked up from his reverie—irked at the interruption—he frowned like a barn owl who’d just received some bad news.

  ‘Camille, don’t interrupt me when I’m working.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ Camille said, not sorry at all. ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Work,’ he said, suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Me? I just wanted to take your lunch order.’

  Richard finally looked at his partner. She was young, fresh-faced, and threw herself at life with a wondrous abandon that Richard didn’t even remotely understand. In fact, as Richard considered Camille, he found himself once again marvelling at how much his partner was a complete mystery to him. In truth, he knew that he was limited in his understanding of women by the fact that he’d been educated at a single-sex boarding school and hadn’t had any kind of meaningful conversation with a woman who wasn’t either his mother or his House Matron before the age of eighteen, but Camille seemed even more impossible to comprehend than most women.

  To begin with, she was French. To end with, she was French. And in between all that, she was French. This meant—to Richard’s mind at least—that she was unreliable, incapable of following orders, and was, all in all, a wild card and loose cannon. In truth, Richard was scared witless of her. Not that he’d ever admitted as much. Even to himself.

  ‘You know what I want for lunch, Camille,’ he said imperiously, trying to take back control of the conversation. ‘Because I’ve had the same lunch every single day I’ve been on this godforsaken island.’

  ‘But Maman says she’s got some spiced yams and rice she can plate up for us all. Or there’s curried goat left over from—’

  ‘Thank you, Camille, but I’d much rather just have my usual.’

  Camille looked at her boss, her eyes sparkling as she got out her police notebook and made a big show of writing down his lunch order. ‘One … banana … sandwich.’

  ‘Thank you, Camille,’ Richard said, somehow aware that he’d been made to look stupid, but not knowing quite how it had happened.

  Camille grabbed up her handbag, sashayed out of the room, and Richard waited to see who of Dwayne or Fidel would appear first from behind their computer monitors.

  It was Ordinary Police Officer Dwayne Myers. But then, as the elder statesman of the station, this was no real surprise.

  Richard tolerated Dwayne—liked him, even—but it was always against his better judgement. Dwayne was in his fifties but looked like he was no older than thirty and, while he wore non-regulation trainers and a bead necklace with his uniform, he was always immaculately turned out. In fact, it was something Richard had always felt he and Dwayne had in common, their sartorial precision. And while Richard knew that Dwayne wasn’t really very interested in being thorough, punctual or following any kind of orders, he was a marvel at digging up information through ‘unofficial’ channels. And on a small tropical island like Saint-Marie, there were a lot of unofficial channels.

  ‘Seriously, Chief,’ Dwayne said. ‘You can’t have the same lunch day after day.’

  ‘I went to boarding school for ten years. Watch me.’

  And now Sergeant Fidel Best’s head appeared to the side of his monitor, his young and trusting face puzzled. Fidel was a proper copper, Richard felt. He was meticulous, keen, utterly tireless, and, above all else, he knew correct procedure. The only downside to Fidel was that he was overly keen, so he’d sometimes continue with a line of inquiry long after it was sensible to drop it. Like now, Richard found himself thinking, as Fidel said, ‘But, sir, don’t you get bored eating the same meal every day of your life?’

  ‘Yes. Extremely. But what can I do?’

  ‘Well, sir, order a different lunch?’

  ‘No, I think I’ll stick to my banana sandwich, if you don’t mind. You know where you are with a banana sandwich.’

  ‘I know,’ Dwayne said, almost awestruck by his boss’s dogged determination never to embrace change. ‘Eating a banana sandwich.’

  The office phone rang and Richard huffed. ‘No, it’s alright, you two stay where you are, I’ll get it.’

  Richard went to the sun-bleached counter and plucked up the ancient phone’s handset.

  ‘Honoré Police Station, this is Detective Inspector Richard Poole speaking. How can I be of assistance?’

  Richard listened a moment before cupping the phone and turning back to his team.

  ‘Fidel. Phone Camille. Cancel the banana sandwich. There’s been a murder.’

  Rianka had set up The Retreat eighteen years ago when she’d bought a derelict sugar plan
tation for a knock-down price. The main house had been abandoned for nearly fifty years by this time, but it wasn’t its outside that Rianka found herself responding to, it was the inside. Admittedly, the interior wasn’t much less damaged, but what Rianka noticed was how the rooms were still as beautifully proportioned and airy as they’d always been; the rotten ceilings were just as high; the main staircase, while leaf-swept and missing many of its boards, was just as grand. To Rianka, the house was no less than a metaphor for the island itself—shabby on the outside, but full of soul on the inside—and, within the year, she’d restored the main house and grounds to their former glory and opened for business as a luxury hotel called ‘The Plantation’.

  When Rianka then got together with Aslan, they’d increasingly started to market the hotel as a high-end health farm, and it wasn’t long before they’d relaunched the whole venture as a luxury spa that was now called ‘The Plantation Spa’.

  The business went from strength to strength.

  Then, as Aslan got more involved in exploring the spiritual side of life, he started offering holistic treatments and therapies to hotel guests—either led by him, or by other instructors he hired especially—and it wasn’t long before they’d relaunched the hotel for a third and final time as ‘The Retreat’.

  For a good few years now, the hotel had been specifically tailored to the internationally wealthy who wanted to heal their minds just as much as they wanted to heal their bodies. Guests could sign up for sessions in healing, be it Crystal, Reiki or Sunrise; or yoga, be it Bikram or Hatha; or meditation, be it Zazen or Transcendental.

  Now, as the police drove up the gravel driveway in convoy, their blue lights flashing dimly in the bright Caribbean sunshine, they could see that the main hotel building was the old plantation owner’s house; manicured lawns swept down to a private beach, and there were incongruous quasi-religious buildings dotted here and there around the grounds with hotel guests coming and going from them.

  Richard, Camille and Fidel climbed out of the police Land Rover and Dwayne dismounted from the Force’s only other vehicle, a 1950s Harley-Davidson motorbike that had an entirely illegal sidecar attached to it. No one quite knew where this bike-with-sidecar had come from, or how it had got tricked up in the livery of the Saint-Marie Police Force, but legend had it—and records seemed to confirm—that it had joined the Saint-Marie Police Force just after Dwayne did. Not that Dwayne was saying.

  Dominic came out of the house—still wearing flip-flops and cut-off shorts, but the gravity of the situation was such that he’d deigned to slip on a vest.

  ‘Man, I’m glad to see you,’ he said, running a hand through his lustrous hair before shaking his head a little so his mane would settle.

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Dominic De Vere. The Retreat’s handyman.’

  Dominic was British and Richard could tell from his drawling accent that he was from a moneyed background. In fact, Richard knew the type well. Posh, dim, wealthy, entitled—and therefore able to waft through life exploring the counter-culture as a hobby. No doubt, if Dominic’s money ever ran out, he’d make a phone call to one of his old school chums, land a high-paid job in the City and then, for the rest of his life, complain that ‘the youth of today’ were feckless layabouts.

  It was fair to say that Richard disliked Dominic on sight.

  ‘If you could just take us to the body,’ he said.

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Richard had no interest in continuing the conversation with someone who wore a shark tooth on a string around his neck, so they all walked on in silence until they reached the corner of the house, which is when Dominic stopped and frowned. Richard looked at him.

  ‘Sorry, is there a problem?’ Richard asked.

  It was clear that there was, but Dominic didn’t know where to start.

  ‘Go on,’ Camille said altogether more tolerantly.

  ‘Okay,’ Dominic said. ‘Well, it’s just …’

  As Dominic stopped speaking, he started to waft his hands near Richard’s body.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Richard asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen this before.’

  ‘I’m a police officer, would you stop stroking my arms?’

  ‘But this isn’t possible.’

  This got Richard’s attention. ‘What’s not possible?’ Dominic exhaled as if he was about to deliver some very bad news.

  ‘You don’t have an aura.’

  Richard looked at Dominic a long moment.

  ‘I know I don’t. Auras don’t exist. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to stay exactly where you are while we go and inspect the body.’

  ‘But your team all have auras.’

  ‘We do?’ Camille said eagerly, holding up her hand for her boss to wait. She wanted to hear this out.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Dominic continued, smiling easily for Camille’s benefit. ‘Yours is yellow, golden … it’s like sunlight. Warm. Impetuous. Open. Sexually adventurous.’

  Camille seemed delighted by this analysis as Dominic held her gaze much longer than he needed to, and Richard found himself noticing that Dominic wasn’t just tanned, muscly and heroically square-jawed, he was also extremely good-looking. In a slightly obvious way of course, Richard found himself adding as an afterthought in his head.

  Dominic next turned his attention to Fidel and considered the air that encompassed him.

  ‘As for you, you’re blues and greens … of kindness … valour. Hard work. Hey, you’re one of the good guys.’

  Fidel blushed. He was clearly just as thrilled with his ‘reading’ as Camille had been with hers.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sakes!’ Richard said. ‘Thank you, Mr De Vere, but I can see that people are congregated over there’—Richard pointed at the Meditation Space as it sat some way away on the lawn—’and I want to make this clear: my colleagues and I are going over to the crime scene right now, and you’re going to stay right here.’

  ‘But what about me?’ Dwayne said, eager as a puppy dog. ‘What’s my aura?’

  Richard huffed in indignation as Dominic turned to Dwayne and took his time to consider. But then a knowing smile slipped onto Dominic’s lips.

  ‘You’re like me. A shape-shifter.’

  Dwayne beamed at what he perceived to be the highest of compliments.

  ‘I knew it.’

  Dominic turned back to Richard. ‘But I’m telling you, when I look at you, I don’t see … anything.’

  ‘Whereas I see a murder scene over there, so thank you very much for your help. Team, you’re with me, but if you try to move even an inch’—Richard said this to Dominic—’I’m going to arrest you for wasting police time.’

  Richard strode off across the lawn, his team trying not to catch each other’s eyes as they got into their boss’s slipstream. After all, it wouldn’t do to turn up at a murder scene giggling.

  But then, there was no chance of Richard or his team laughing by the time they arrived at the Meditation Space, where they found six shell-shocked Brits sitting or standing on the grass. Five of them were wearing white cotton robes that were variously spattered in drying blood. The sixth of them—Rianka—was sitting on the grass on her own. She was wearing a long Indian-style skirt with little mirrors sewn into the hemline, a light summer blouse, and leather sandals.

  ‘Okay, my name’s Detective Inspector Richard Poole,’ Richard said. ‘And this is Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey. Can any of you tell me what happened?’

  ‘That’s simple,’ said a well-tanned man in his fifties with a Yorkshire accent, a thick gold chain just visible around his neck. Richard also had time to notice a chunky gold watch on the man’s wrist. Clearly he was seriously wealthy.

  ‘The name’s Ben Jenkins,’ the man said. ‘And you should know, that woman over there, she says her name’s Julia Higgins. And she’s admitted it all. She killed Aslan Kennedy.’

  Richard could see that Ben was pointing at
a young woman in a bloodied white robe who was standing on her own on the grass. She was in her early twenties, had long blonde hair that was tied up in a ponytail, and she was looking back at Richard with doe eyes, seemingly as dismayed by the accusation as everyone else. But she wasn’t denying it, either, Richard noted.

  With a quick nod of his head, Richard indicated that Dwayne should ghost over to Julia and make sure she didn’t make a run for it. As Dwayne started to move, Richard turned back to Ben.

  ‘And where’s the body?’

  ‘In there.’ Ben pointed at the Meditation Space.

  Richard turned to the group. ‘Then if you’d all just wait here, please. The Detective Sergeant and I will only be a moment. Camille?’

  Richard headed over to the Meditation Space, Camille coming over to join him, but Richard found himself stopping at the threshold to the building.

  ‘One moment,’ Richard said as he held his hand up for Camille to pause, because it was only now as Richard approached that he saw that the walls to the building were made of paper. In fact, as he looked closer, he could see that the paper was waxy, clearly very strong, and was even somewhat translucent. Richard put his hand on the other side of the door and noticed that he could still dimly see his hand’s shape through the paper.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Camille asked.

  Richard ignored Camille as he took a moment to inspect the door to the building. He saw that there was no handle on the outside, but there was a Yale-style latch lock on the inside of the door that was screwed deep into the wooden frame—and that there was a corresponding housing on the door frame that it slotted into when the room was locked.

  But without a keyhole on the outside, it appeared as though the door could only be locked and unlocked from the inside. Richard filed this information away for later consideration.

  Stepping into the room, Richard immediately understood why the walls and roof were made of translucent paper, because every inch of the walls glowed with brilliant sunshine. And not only was it brighter inside the room than it was outside, it was significantly hotter too, like being at the heart of a supernova. Which was just bloody typical, Richard thought to himself.