Murder in the Caribbean

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Whoa,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands. ‘Back up there a moment. Fidel and me have got the boat to shore. But we need to process the blood we found on it. And lift whatever prints we can find. So I came back to the station to pick up the Crime Scene Kit. And when I got here – only minutes ago, I can tell you – I found Amy waiting for me.’

  ‘You came back to get the Crime Scene Kit?’

  ‘I said.’

  ‘So why haven’t you got it in your hands right now?’

  Dwayne was puzzled that his boss was so interested.

  ‘I was thirsty after all that hard work in the sun. So I got a drink of water with Amy here, and now – what you’re interrupting – is me telling her I’m busy on a case and we’ll have to meet up later on.’

  Richard didn’t believe a word Dwayne was saying. He’d been sloping off work and hanging out with his new girlfriend again, Richard was sure of it.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused a problem,’ Amy said in her lilting Edinburgh accent.

  ‘It’s not you who’s caused a problem,’ Richard said, stiffly.

  ‘And anyway, it wasn’t Dwayne I came down here to see,’ she continued, and then she gave Dwayne a playful punch on the arm. Dwayne winced in melodramatic pretence that the punch had caused him mortal pain. Amy pulled a shocked face, and Richard sighed internally at the whole teenage horseplay of it all. As far as he could tell, Amy was in her early forties, and she and Dwayne were surely old enough to have got beyond what his mother called the ‘giggling and pinching’ stage of courtship.

  It was only once he’d finished his thought process that Richard realised that he’d not quite registered what Amy had said.

  ‘How do you mean, you didn’t come to see Dwayne?’ he asked, as Camille joined them on the veranda.

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Amy said. ‘I came to apologise to you.’

  ‘Apologise?’

  ‘Of course. For answering the door to you wearing only a towel this morning.’

  Richard’s face flushed, and Amy smiled with an understanding of his embarrassment that just made his cheeks burn an even deeper shade of red.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he blustered. ‘It wasn’t quite what I expected, but don’t worry, I’ve seen worse. I mean, better. Or not better – that’s not right. I just mean, I’ve seen . . . if I’m honest,’ Richard said in quiet despair, ‘I don’t quite know what I mean.’

  ‘You just mean,’ Amy said, smoothing over Richard’s awkwardness, ‘you’re used to seeing semi-naked women.’

  ‘Well, normally only on the mortician’s slab, if I’m honest,’ Richard said by way of keeping things light, but it was only as he looked at Camille and Dwayne’s horrified faces that he realised how creepy he must have sounded.

  ‘Anyway,’ Amy said awkwardly, ‘no harm done. I just wanted to apologise. And introduce myself properly to you. I’m Amy McDiarmid.’

  Amy held out her hand, and Richard was relieved finally that normality had resumed.

  ‘Richard Poole,’ he said. ‘How do you do.’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ Amy said, as amused as Richard’s team was at his formality. ‘Although, I wanted to ask. Did you manage to see any birds this morning?’

  ‘How do you mean, did I see any birds?’

  ‘Well, it’s just, I couldn’t help noticing. When you came to the door, you had a pair of binoculars around your neck.’

  ‘You did?’ Dwayne said. ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Amy said. ‘A nice pair of binoculars.’

  ‘But you’re not into birdwatching, Chief,’ Dwayne said.

  ‘I don’t think he was birdwatching,’ Camille said as she realised what the binoculars meant. ‘You were spying on Dwayne, weren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not how it looks,’ Richard said weakly.

  ‘You were spying on me?’ Dwayne said, amazed.

  ‘But Thursday mornings are for revising for your sergeant’s exam. And I’ve never seen you with any of the revision materials in the office. Or talking about how hard the work is. In fact, I’ve seen no evidence you’ve even started work on your exams. So I just wanted to check up on you. You know, that you were actually studying.’

  Dwayne stared long and hard at his boss.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you’d been using your binoculars to get a glimpse of a beautiful naked woman, I reckon I could understand where you were coming from. But snooping on colleagues to check they’re looking at a load of old books . . .?’

  Richard didn’t quite know what to say. Dwayne was making it sound like he was in the wrong and not Dwayne.

  ‘Now, I’ve got a Crime Scene Kit to get,’ Dwayne continued primly. ‘Amy, I’ll see you later.’

  Dwayne gave Amy a quick kiss on the cheek, and then he turned and entered the Police station.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Amy said kindly, touching Richard’s besuited elbow. ‘You know what Dwayne’s like. He’ll forget about all this in no time at all. He doesn’t bear grudges.’

  Richard’s mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, we’re in the middle of an active case, I’ll need to answer my phone, it could be important.’

  Richard stepped to one side, which gave Amy a moment alone with Camille.

  ‘You really answered the door to him wearing only a towel?’ Camille asked.

  ‘I’m afraid I did.’

  ‘I’d have paid anything to see his face.’

  ‘He went bright red.’

  ‘I bet he did.’

  ‘You know what? Your boss is just like Dwayne said he’d be. But even more so.’

  Camille smiled. She’d spent a long time with Richard, and she’d long ago realised that most of his sudden squalls of anger and stick-in-the-mud curmudgeonliness came from an upbringing that had straitjacketed him from the moment he put on his first suit, shirt and tie aged four. Camille believed that inside her boss, just as surely was the case with every human, there was a free spirit bursting to get out. In the meantime, she found herself a wry spectator to his wrecking-ball social interactions. And the fact that Richard was utterly dedicated to solving crimes went a long way in her mind to making up for all his other inadequacies. Mind you, she thought to herself, he’d crossed a line when he’d started spying on Dwayne with a pair of binoculars. She knew she’d have to speak to him about that later on.

  Richard returned from his phonecall, energised.

  ‘Okay, that was Fidel, Camille. He says he’s found something on the boat we need to see. At once. Amy, you’ll have to excuse us.’

  ‘Of course,’ Amy said, and called out, ‘Send my love to Dwayne,’ as she started clipping down the stairs to leave the Police station.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Richard replied before turning back to Camille. ‘Right then, seeing as we’ve now got two scenes to work, I suggest we split up. You take the Crime Scene Kit back to Natasha and Conrad’s house. Dust the window frame and windowsill for fingerprints. Also, someone should see if there are any prints on that chunk of concrete that was used to smash the glass. And while you’re about it, check for footprints in the soil outside the window, and do a quick door-to-door. Did any of the neighbours see or hear anything suspicious like breaking glass before or after the explosion this morning? And above all else, make sure you bag the paste ruby. It was left on the desk for a reason, and I suggest we find out what it was.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Dwayne came out of the station holding the large metal flight case that was the station’s Crime Scene Kit.

  ‘Dwayne,’ Richard said, ‘Camille will need the kit for herself, she’s working a secondary crime scene. So I want you down at the harbour running a door-to-door. And also go yacht to yacht for that matter. Did anyone see Mr Gardiner go out on his boat this morning? And was anyone with him, or was he on his own? We still don’t know who was on his boat when it exploded.’

  ‘Were you really spying on me?’

  ‘W
e don’t have time for this now, Dwayne. I also need you to get onto the Saint-Marie dive school. I want them in their scuba kit and scouring the sea bed where the boat went down. I want a list of everything that sank from Conrad’s boat.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Camille said to Dwayne. ‘I’ll talk to him about snooping on you.’

  ‘Not now you won’t,’ Richard said, heading down the stairs. ‘I need to see Fidel, and you both need to get on with your jobs.’

  A few minutes later, Richard was striding along the concrete quay towards where he saw the back half of Conrad’s boat resting on its side. Fidel was erecting ‘Police – Do Not Cross’ tape around it, and to the side of the quay, the Saint-Marie Coastguard were making good the winch on their boat.

  ‘Okay, Fidel, what have you got for me?’ Richard called out as he approached.

  ‘Well, sir, the explosion wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Let me show you.’

  Fidel led Richard around the structure, and Richard could see that the wooden sides of the hull were jagged and torn in a way that looked as though a leviathan had risen from the deep, snapped the boat in two with its jaws – and this was the bit of the boat it had then tossed aside.

  Passing the sharp edges of the hull, Richard saw that the interior of the boat had been mostly ripped out by the explosion, although there were still plenty of old pipes and rusting metal fixings sticking out at crazy angles. Mercifully, there were no smears of blood here, but Richard watched as Fidel stepped up to a dirty grey tube that ran along the inside of the boat and which was fixed with red cable ties.

  ‘Okay, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘I think that this section of the boat was once the engine compartment. And this tube here was the fuel inlet to the engine.’

  ‘So where’s the engine?’

  ‘I imagine it got blown from its housing and sank with everything else. But the thing is, on boats like this, the engines tend to be at the rear. In a tight and enclosed space directly under the driving position.’

  ‘Okay,’ Richard said, wondering where Fidel was going with this.

  ‘It can make them seriously dangerous if there’s any kind of cut or tear in the fuel inlet. Like we’ve got here.’

  Fidel indicated a point on the pipe with his forefinger, and Richard could see that there was a deep cut that ran along it for about three inches.

  ‘How did that get there?’

  ‘I’ve looked at it, and it’s pretty neat. I think someone slit it open using a sharp knife.’

  ‘But why would they want to do that?’

  ‘Well, a tear in the fuel line like this isn’t enough to let much petrol leak, but it’s enough to let fumes from the petrol get out.’

  ‘Oh,’ Richard said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘Petrol fumes that then build up inside the enclosed space.’

  ‘Exactly, sir. And then, the tiniest spark and the whole thing goes up.’

  ‘But how did you find that rip?’ Richard asked, looking at all the dozens of feet of pipes that ran around the inside of the boat’s hull.

  ‘Well, sir, I was carrying out a visual inspection of the wreck when I found this.’

  Fidel walked around the inside of the boat and pulled down a mess of what looked like electric cables that were tied together with parcel tape. But as Richard looked more closely, he saw that there was something else that the parcel tape was holding in place.

  It was a mobile phone.

  What was a mobile phone doing taped to the inside of an engine compartment?

  As Richard looked again, he could see that it was one of the old-fashioned plastic phones that had no touchscreen, it just had buttons and the smallest of screens for the minimum of text.

  But there were also two thin electric cables emerging from the housing of the phone – and the plastic at the end of each cable was stripped back to reveal copper wires. Richard took a step back, the sheer enormity of what Fidel had uncovered hitting him.

  ‘Good grief,’ he said.

  Someone had sliced into the fuel pipes of the boat so that the enclosed engine compartment would fill with petrol fumes. But this person had also taped a doctored phone inside the same engine compartment. When the boat was heading out to sea, the compartment filled with petrol vapour, and this person had then rung the number of the mobile phone. The incoming call had turned on the circuit that was supposed to drive the motor that made the phone vibrate, but it had been re-routed to a couple of cables that led outside the casing. And once the current was flowing in these two little cables, the electricity had arced and caused the tiniest of sparks.

  The spark had caused the petrol to explode, and the boat had blown apart.

  Despite the heat, a shiver ran down Richard’s spine.

  Fidel was right. Conrad hadn’t died in some tragic accident at sea.

  He’d been murdered in cold blood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Of the many things that irritated Richard about the tropical island of Saint-Marie, perhaps the one that infuriated him the most was just how small it was. It’s not that he had an objection to its size per se. After all, as he often had occasion to tell his team, he’d holidayed many times on the Isle of Wight as a child, so he knew something about island living. But it was one thing to take a vacation on an island, and quite another to run a Police investigation on one.

  For starters there were no forensic or pathology labs on Saint-Marie, so whenever Richard needed to process any kind of physical evidence, it had to be sent ‘off island’ to Guadeloupe. But the island’s size also meant he only had access to two Police vehicles. One of these was a battered old Mark II Land Rover that was painted mustard yellow and had the crest of the Saint-Marie Police Force on the bonnet and sides. For all Richard publicly grumbled about the vehicle, he couldn’t help but feel a grudging affinity with it. Like him it was British, hadn’t even been remotely designed for tropical climes, and yet here it was, chugging along and doing the best it could in very testing circumstances.

  But if Richard tolerated the Police Land Rover, the same couldn’t be said for the other Police vehicle, a sputtering Harley Davidson motorbike that had an attached, almost-certainly illegal sidecar. Only Dwayne was qualified to drive the infernal machine, and Richard only travelled in it under sufferance. After all, as he’d tell anyone who asked, if the answer is ever ‘get on a motorbike driven by Dwayne’, you’ve very definitely been asking the wrong question.

  However, the most irksome aspect of island living, as far as Richard was concerned, was that the distances were often so small that the quickest way to get somewhere was to walk. And while Richard loved the idea of walking in theory – particularly on a crisp winter’s day, the grass stiff on the ground with frost – it was quite a different matter yomping through the blistering heat of the tropics wearing a thick woollen suit.

  Sweating heavily, Richard arrived at Mrs Gardiner’s house, and found Camille inspecting the earth beneath the smashed window. Having updated her that he and Fidel now believed Conrad had been murdered, Richard asked what Camille had so far been able to find.

  ‘Not much of anything, sir,’ she said. ‘There are no footprints out here. And no cigarette butts or anything else that suggests anyone was here. And the window’s not overlooked by any of the neighbours, so they didn’t see anything, either.’

  ‘Did they hear the moment the window was smashed?’

  ‘I’ve asked whoever I can find who was nearby at the time, and no-one saw or heard anything suspicious.’

  ‘I see,’ Richard said, disappointed. ‘Then what about the window frame?’

  Camille explained that she’d just finished inspecting the outside frame, and it was so rough and weather-beaten it wasn’t possible to lift any fingerprints from it.

  ‘Then what about the break-in? Has Mrs Gardiner got any theories?’

  ‘None. Although I asked her
to have a proper look at everything that was thrown on the floor, and she said she’s not sure, but she thinks nothing’s been stolen.’

  ‘In which case, the break-in was all about leaving the ruby.’

  ‘Which is kind of crazy, sir.’

  ‘I’d agree with you there. Because, why bother?’

  ‘It’s a message, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking. It’s got no intrinsic value, so it must be symbolic somehow. Or a warning of some kind.’

  ‘To Natasha?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. Because it wasn’t a message for Conrad, was it? I mean, with him dead, he’s not going to receive it, is he? Look, let’s talk to Natasha again. We need to tell her the explosion wasn’t an accident, and I want to press her a bit more about this ruby.’

  Richard and Camille went into the house, but Natasha was nowhere to be found. However, the French windows were open, and they could see that she was standing on the beach down by the sea.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Richard said to himself as he stepped out of the house and onto the bright white sand. He hated walking on beaches in his brogues, and he still couldn’t quite believe that it was an occupational hazard he had to endure on an almost daily basis.

  ‘Mrs Gardiner?’ Camille asked as they approached, but Natasha didn’t turn round. She just kept staring out at the distant horizon.

  Richard cleared his throat to get the woman’s attention.

  ‘If he’s in the water, he’ll come in here, won’t he?’ Natasha said, almost to herself. ‘I mean, this is the nearest beach.’

  ‘It is,’ Camille said, kindly. ‘But there have been developments. It looks like maybe your husband’s boat didn’t explode by accident.’

  Natasha’s brow furrowed, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘It looks like it was set off by an IED,’ Richard said. ‘An improvised explosive device.’

  This finally registered with her.

  ‘I’m, sorry . . .?’

  ‘Now, I understand this is a terrible shock,’ Camille said before her boss could be any more insensitive, ‘but if someone was behind this terrible event, then every passing hour will make it harder for us to catch them.’