‘And that was definitely Pierre?’
‘I showed him Pierre’s mugshot, and he positively identified him. It was Pierre who was wearing the blue jacket, and who got in the grey Citroën.’
‘Did he see who was driving as he got closer?’
‘That’s the thing. He said that as soon as Pierre got in the passenger side, the car did a three-point turn and drove out of here. He never saw who was driving.’
‘Look,’ Richard said, suddenly angry. ‘Would someone please get rid of this bloody chicken?’
‘You just had to ask,’ Dwayne said, reaching down to pick up the offending creature. He then took hold of the bird’s head and gently tucked it under its wing.
‘Don’t worry, Chief,’ Dwayne said. ‘Chickens are so stupid, if it’s too dark for them to see, they go to sleep.’
And with that, Dwayne put the chicken back on the floor, its head still tucked neatly under its wing.
The chicken didn’t move. It just stood there stock still.
‘Dwayne,’ Richard said. ‘I take back everything I’ve ever said about you. Thank you.’
Despite his words, Richard was a touch unnerved that there was what appeared to be a headless chicken standing on the ground in front of him – it felt too much like a metaphor for how he was leading the case – so he decided they should all return to the Police station.
Over the next few days, Richard set his team the task of discovering how many Citroën CX owners there were on the island. Fidel rang round the list of names he was able to pull from Government House while Camille rang Natasha Gardiner. Did her husband by any chance own a grey Citroën? She replied that the only car she and Conrad owned was a black Toyota. This was welcome information in that it fitted with the witness who’d said that three men had arrived after Pierre in an old black car. But it was less welcome information in that it also implied that it hadn’t been Conrad who’d later returned. So who had it been?
Richard also wanted to know how Dwayne was getting on with identifying the shop where Pierre had bought the red ruby. Unfortunately, Dwayne said that he’d rung every jewellery and tourist knick-knack shop he could think of, but he’d drawn a complete blank. No-one he spoke to sold anything like fake red rubies, and nor did they know where you’d go on the island to buy them.
Fidel also didn’t get good news from the phone company about the SIM card from the phone that had been used to set off the bomb.
‘Sir,’ he’d said to Richard. ‘The SIM card did indeed receive a call on the morning the boat exploded. And the call came in at the right time. But the number that dialled in to the phone came from another pre-paid mobile phone that was bought on Saint-Marie over a year ago. Just like the phone on the boat. Which suggests to me the killer maybe bought the two phones as a pair. With cash. So they’d be totally untraceable.’
It was another dead end.
As for the Saint-Marie Dive School, their search of the sea bed under the area of the explosion proved just as fruitless.
The remaining bulk of the boat had split into three different sections as it sank to the bottom of the sea, and they’d found a considerable spread of debris lying in the sand all around. Remembering how the harbour master had said that he’d seen Conrad load some scuba tanks onto his boat on the morning that he was killed, Richard asked if any diving tanks had been found on the sea bed. This was his way of working out how diligent the divers had been, and how reliable their testimony was. Unfortunately for Richard, he was told that no such equipment had been found. It was possible they were still trapped inside one of the sections of boat, of course, but this was the last thing Richard wanted to hear. After all, if the scuba tanks were there but the Saint-Marie Dive School hadn’t found them, then that begged the question, what else were they failing to find?
And throughout all this, Richard kept working on trying to identify where Pierre was now hiding. But there was no evidence of Pierre staying in any of the local hotels, hostels or B&Bs. So where was he? And there was another aspect of Pierre’s vanishing act that increasingly irked Richard. Pierre had left prison with only one hundred dollars to his name, and he’d left the cash behind when he’d driven off in the grey Citroën later that afternoon. So, wherever he was hiding, Richard was increasingly of the opinion that someone must be helping him. Either financially, or by offering him a safe place to hide. But who was it? If Dwayne was right, the various hoodlums and ne’er-do-wells on the island had all forgotten about Pierre years ago – decades ago, even – so who could be offering him sanctuary?
Richard tried to glean what he could from the prison record Fidel had brought back, but it didn’t offer much by way of new information. Pierre kept himself to himself, he didn’t belong to any of the gangs, and he didn’t take or deal drugs. As far as Richard could tell, he’d been something of a model prisoner. Even his personal statement for the Parole Board was down-the-line ‘correct’. In it, Pierre had said how he acknowledged what he’d done, he’d regretted it ever since, and now he felt he’d paid his debt to society.
As for visitors, the only person from outside the prison who’d had any contact with Pierre while he was inside was the prison’s official prison visitor, Father Luc Durant. When Richard read the name Luc Durant, he remembered that Natasha Gardiner had said that she went to Father Luc Durant’s church. This gave Richard pause. Although it wasn’t unheard of on a small island like Saint-Marie that the name of a person tangential to the case should crop up more than once, Richard didn’t like the coincidence.
He decided he’d call the Governor of the Saint-Marie Prison, ostensibly to garner whatever background information he could on Pierre, but also because he wanted to ask about Father Luc Durant.
‘Sure, I know Pierre,’ the Governor said in a weary voice as the call was put through to him. ‘But I don’t know him, if you know what I mean.’
‘Not really,’ Richard said. ‘Could you explain?’
‘Well, I was on the review board when he came up for parole, so I met him then. And I’ve been through his prison record. But before that I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out from a crowd. Sorry.’
‘And how did he seem when he came up for parole?’
There was a dry laugh from the end of the phone.
‘That’s the one time in a prisoner’s sentence you know you’re not seeing the real man. It’s understandable. It’s a job interview, isn’t it? For the job of being allowed to operate in freedom outside the prison again.’
‘But you’ve seen a lot of prisoners, what did you pick up from him?’
‘That he was bone tired. That he was sick of the prison. Sick of us.’
‘Did he seem dangerous?’
‘Obviously not,’ the Governor said with an edge to his voice. ‘Or we’d not have let him out early.’
‘Then can you tell me something about Father Luc Durant?’
‘What do you want to know about him?’
‘He’s the only person I can find who ever visited Pierre.’
‘That’s hardly surprising. Father Luc Durant visits all our prisoners. But you’re right, if you want to know what Pierre was really like, talk to Father Luc. He’ll be able to tell you a bit more about him.’
‘And is Father Luc entirely trustworthy?’
‘Of course. He’s one of the most trustworthy men I know. He’s always here for prisoners, and there’s precious few people I can say that about, I can tell you.’
Thanking the Governor for his time, Richard ended the call and then phoned Father Luc’s church. The call was answered by a man who high-handedly informed Richard that Father Luc was leading a funeral and couldn’t possibly come to the phone. However, he’d pass on the policeman’s message just as soon as he returned.
Richard hung up the call with a growing sense of frustration. It was all very well trying to find out what Pierre was like, but that didn’t answer the question, where was he now? They had no real leads, and every day that passed brought them one day clos
er to the next murder, he was sure of it.
Richard decided to go back to the original case notes on Pierre’s robbery. As he did so, Richard remembered that the man who’d been murdered – André Morgan – had come from Saint-Marie.
Richard clicked forwards in the digital archive on his screen until he was looking at what the Met Police had on André Morgan. He could see the contact details of his parents, both of whom lived in Honoré. He also saw that André had left school at eighteen, and had become an assistant in a jewellery shop in Honoré three years later. The manager of the Honoré branch had been interviewed by the Police after the murder and had said that André was hardworking, and superbly attentive to his customers. A year after starting as a trainee, he was promoted to a full-time job, and within another year he’d been made senior salesman for the shop. Then, two years later, André decided he wanted to travel, applied for a salesman’s post at the flagship store in Bond Street in London, and got the job.
Richard carried on reading the manager’s statement, and was intrigued to see how he’d said he’d not been entirely sorry to see André leave. Because, although he’d had so much potential when he’d started out, he felt that André had perhaps ‘taken his foot off the pedal’ recently. The manager went on to say that he’d turned up late for work a couple of times, and he’d even given the impression on other occasions that he was suffering from a hangover. It wasn’t appropriate behaviour for a member of staff in a shop that had such an exclusive clientele.
Wondering what had prompted this possible change in André, Richard scrolled on through the notes the Metropolitan Police had taken after talking to André’s boss in the London store, and here Richard could see that things seemed to have returned to normal for André. According to his London manager’s statement, André worked hard, was punctual, and was an exemplary member of the team. He’d been working at the store for nearly three months without blemish when he was murdered.
In fact, Richard saw from the statement that the manager of the London store had been present when the robbery had taken place, and he said André didn’t interact with the robbers at all. He thought the robbers’ focus was entirely on the security man and the manager himself, and making sure they got hold of the briefcase of jewels. It was only as the robbers were leaving that one of them pulled a gun, turned to André and shot him dead in cold blood.
It was as Richard read this fact for the umpteenth time that he realised something.
Why hadn’t Pierre shot the manager? Or the security guard? Seeing as he was prepared to commit murder, surely they were far more likely to be able to testify against him later on? So why, considering the fact that André hadn’t interacted with the robbers at all, had Pierre shot him dead?
What if it was because he was connected to the robbers somehow?
And in a world where he was running out of lines of enquiry, Richard decided that he should pursue the André Morgan angle. But how could he even begin to do that seeing as the young man had been dead for the last twenty years?
Richard looked back in the file to the contact details of André’s parents. That was as good a place to start as any. He picked up his phone and dialled the number that was listed. The phone was answered on the second ring.
‘Honoré Bakery,’ a male voice said.
‘Is that Mr Morgan?’ Richard asked.
‘It is.’
‘This is Detective Inspector Richard Poole. Can I ask, are you the father of André Morgan?’
There was a silence from the other end of the phone. Richard listened carefully and began to worry that the man had hung up.
‘Why are you asking?’ the man eventually said.
‘Can I first just check? You’re the father of André Morgan, who died in a jewellery robbery just over twenty years ago?’
This time the silence on the other end of the call was filled with breathing that Richard could hear had suddenly got heavy.
‘Why are you ringing?’
‘Are you André Morgan’s father?’
‘Yes, but why are you ringing? Is this to do with Pierre Charpentier?’
Now it was Richard’s turn to be surprised.
‘You know about him?’
‘Of course. I was there the day he left prison.’
‘You were?’
‘The man who killed my son? Yes. I was there. Look, I can’t talk to you over the phone. Come to the bakery. I’ll tell you what happened when he got out of prison if you come to my office.’
Richard said he’d be along in a few minutes, and hung up. He then called across the room.
‘Camille, I think we’ve just got ourselves a lead.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
As it happened, Richard knew Mr Morgan’s bakery well, as he had a secret weakness he didn’t like to admit to his team. He adored French pastry. Every buttery crumb of it. In particular he loved glossy éclairs full of whipped Chantilly cream. But he also loved delicately layered mille feuille, sugar-glazed babs au rhum, and pretty much anything that contained chocolate. So, if Richard ever had a taxing day at work – and, if he were honest, these seemed to happen more often than not – he’d pick up a delicate pastry on the way home. At first, Richard had worried that his ardour for this most fancy of French cooking would result in him piling on the pounds, but he soon realised that the sweltering heat of his walk home was negating the calories the pastry would otherwise have been putting on. In fact, Richard increasingly believed that a quick macaroon – which, after all, was mostly coconutty air surrounded by an almond case of brittle wonder – was the necessary fuel he needed to get home.
Not that he did it every day, of course. Or had become obsessed in any way.
The young man behind the counter looked up as Richard and Camille entered the shop.
‘Your usual?’ he asked, and Richard blushed bright red. This was exactly the start to the conversation he’d been hoping to avoid.
‘Your usual?’ Camille asked, deeply amused.
‘Oh yes,’ the assistant said. ‘The Detective Inspector is a most valued customer. But tell me, did you bring that spoon back?’
Much too late, Richard realised that he did indeed have a used and washed-up spoon in his inside pocket. He’d borrowed it the day before, when he’d said he’d like to be able to eat his crème au caramel on the way home.
Somewhat shamefacedly, Richard reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the little spoon.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘No worries. Now, how can I help you?’
Richard realised he didn’t quite have the energy to continue his end of the conversation, so Camille stepped into the breach.
‘We’re here to talk to your boss, Stefan Morgan.’
‘Of course. He’s in his office at the back. Come on through.’
The assistant indicated a little door to the side of the counter, and Richard and Camille went through, finding themselves in a gloomy corridor that was full of tall metal stands that smelled of sugar and flour.
‘Come here often, do you, sir?’ Camille asked, unable to let her boss’s recent encounter pass without comment.
‘Hardly.’
‘But I thought you were one of their most valued customers?’
‘He exaggerated.’
‘Even though you’ve always told me, the problem with France is that it’s full of French food.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You’re always saying that! How you can’t get a decent meal in a French restaurant.’
‘Well, you can’t. Unless you want to eat pigs’ trotters or snails.’
‘Or frogs’ legs, I know,’ Camille said, completing Richard’s sentence for him. ‘In fact, as you keep telling us, the French are terrible chefs. And now I realise why you’ve been so rude about us all of this time. You’re repressed.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You love the French really, but you’re in denial.’
‘I don’t, and I’m not.’
‘But you love our pastries, don’t you?’
‘Okay, I admit I quite like the pastries from your country, but they’re not that special, you know. The British have pastries, too.’
‘Oh they do, do they?’ Camille said, putting her hand on her hip.
‘You’d better believe it. I mean, we’ve got . . .’ Richard said, wracking his brain to think of a single British pastry. ‘Sausage rolls,’ he eventually said. ‘They’re pretty special. And your humble pork pie’s a pastry, too. Don’t forget that.’
‘Pork pie? What’s that?’
‘Well, it’s bits of pork moulded into a cylinder that’s then sealed in meat jelly. And it’s surrounded by the most delicious pastry, cut through with lard, which is of course the secret.’
‘Lard?’
‘That’s right. Lard.’
‘What’s lard?’
‘Well, if you’re going to put it like that, it’s pig fat.’
Richard’s words hung in the frangipane-scented air.
‘I don’t think I’ve quite done it justice,’ he added.
‘No, it sounds lovely. Pig meat in pig jelly surrounded by pig fat.’
‘You’ve got to taste one.’
‘No,’ Camille said, going in for the kill. ‘I want you to admit it right now. French pastry is superior to British.’
‘Different, I’ll grant you. Not superior.’
‘But you love it, don’t you? Which is why you come in here every day, and the assistant greeted you by asking, “your usual”?’
Richard couldn’t quite see a way of denying what was so obviously a self-evident truth, so he decided to do what any true-born Englishman does when confronted with an embarrassing fact: he’d just pretend the conversation wasn’t happening.
‘We can’t stand here all day gassing,’ he said, walking away. ‘We need to interview Mr Morgan.’
Before Camille could reply, Richard opened the door at the end of the corridor, and walked in on a very plump man who was sitting behind an enormous desk. He had a wooden box open in front of him, and he was looking at old newspaper cuttings and photos.
Murder in the Caribbean Page 8