Murder in the Caribbean

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘Did he join any of the gangs?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Oh no, he wasn’t that sort of a person. In fact, he wasn’t interested in making friends at all. Not even with me. I just got the impression that he was keeping his head down until he could make parole. But I have to say, that wasn’t to say he didn’t have anger in him. I always felt with Pierre that he was giving me the “best” version of himself, and there was actually quite a lot of emotion going on under the surface.’

  ‘And that emotion was anger?’

  ‘You see it in a lot of prisoners. There’s a ferocity to them sometimes. Like a coiled spring. After all, they’re locked up all day. And that’s what I felt with Pierre. That he had a whole load of energy just waiting to burst out. And not good energy. Anyway, as I say, this is all quite normal for a man who’s spent the best part of two decades in prison.’

  ‘Would you say he was an intelligent man?’

  Father Luc was surprised by the question.

  ‘I’d say so, I suppose. He had that sort of brooding intelligence. Although, now you mention it, I never saw him with a book in his cell. But there was a way he’d look at you, like he was working you out.’

  ‘Did you like him?’ Camille asked.

  Father Luc pursed his lips as he thought.

  ‘I’m not sure that I did, if that’s not an uncharitable thing to say about another human being. After all, it’s very hard to like the people who are inside for murder. I always show them kindness, of course. And sympathy. But I don’t have to like someone after they’ve taken another person’s life.’

  ‘But I see you recommended that he be released early on parole.’

  ‘Of course. Everyone deserves a second chance whether I like them or not. And he’d not been violent at any time in the twenty years he was inside. Not as far as I knew.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about the reason why he was in prison?’

  ‘He did, actually. Just the once. He told me he wasn’t the man he’d been then.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Last year. I think I’d started to talk to him about his upcoming parole.’

  ‘And that’s when he finally spoke about what he was in for?’

  ‘He didn’t talk about it all that much. He just said he wasn’t the man he’d been when he’d been sent to prison. He said he’d learned his lesson.’

  ‘Which is why you recommended him for parole.’

  ‘Admission of guilt is a big part of the parole process.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘Maybe. Sometimes you just have to trust that human nature is good after all.’

  Father Luc pulled a smartphone from his inside jacket pocket and checked the time on it.

  ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an evening service to prepare for. There really is no rest for the wicked.’

  ‘Of course, but could I just ask you about Conrad Gardiner?’

  ‘I’m sorry. What’s that?’

  ‘Did you know Conrad Gardiner?’

  ‘I know most people on the island, so of course I knew Conrad. And I must say, I was just as shocked as everyone else when I heard what happened to him.’

  ‘Was he a member of your congregation?’

  ‘I don’t believe he was a member of anyone’s,’ Father Luc said sadly. ‘He suffered from the same illness as Camille’s mother here. Atheism.’

  ‘Then what about his wife? Is she a member of your congregation?’

  ‘Look, you really must excuse me, but I can’t be late for my service,’ Father Luc said, doing up the buttons on his jacket.

  ‘But how well do you know the family?’

  ‘I barely know Conrad, but we hardly moved in the same circles. As for his wife, now you mention it, she comes to church regularly. And I’ve got to know her a little over the years. She’s a very good woman, if you ask me. And I don’t think she deserved to be married to a man as lazy as Conrad was. There, I’ve said it. Is that what you wanted to hear? That I thought he was lazy?’

  ‘Actually, that’s not what I wanted you to say.’

  ‘Then I can only apologise—’

  ‘Because what I wanted you to say was, “what has Conrad’s death got to do with Pierre Charpentier’s?”’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You see, I just jumped from talking about Pierre Charpentier to talking about Conrad Gardiner and you didn’t stop for one second to ask what the connection was.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Father Luc said, unable to keep a note of annoyance out of his voice. ‘I also have no idea why you’re asking about Pierre Charpentier, but I answered your questions like a good citizen. And it’s the same for Conrad Gardiner. You ask, and I answer. Now, I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but I really have to return to my flock. If you have any further questions,’ Father Luc said, already leaving the veranda, ‘you know where to find me. My door is always open to the Police, but I really must go.’

  Richard and Camille watched Father Luc beetle away down the steps from the Police Station.

  ‘Now I don’t know about you,’ Richard said to his partner, ‘but did we just rattle Father Durant’s cage?’

  ‘It’s how it felt to me.’

  ‘But why? What’s his connection to Conrad?’

  Richard returned to the main office deep in thought, and saw that Fidel was taking a phonecall.

  ‘Now, don’t worry,’ Fidel said calmly into the receiver while waving to get the attention of everyone else. ‘You stay right there, miss. I’m hanging up now, and we’ll call an ambulance on the way, but you’ll have the Saint-Marie Police Force at your house in a matter of minutes.’

  Fidel slammed the phone down into its cradle.

  ‘Sir, that was a woman called Blaise Frost. She says she’s just discovered her husband’s body at her house. Someone’s shot him dead!’

  As the Police jeep screeched to a halt, Richard and Camille jumped out, and Richard saw that Dwayne’s bike had arrived before them, and Dwayne and Fidel were already dismounting. As for where they were, Richard had no idea. He’d had his eyes closed and his hands gripped to the passenger door for most of the journey. Not that Camille was a bad driver. Far from it. She was just fearless, and that’s what put the fear of God into Richard.

  As Richard and his team strode to the door, he saw that the house they’d arrived at was grand, but not in a typical Saint-Marie style. It was all jet-black cladding and large sheets of geometrically shaped glass.

  The front door opened as they arrived to reveal a tall, willowy woman who was wearing a deep red silk dressing gown over a tight exercise outfit in electric blue, and who appeared to be even taller because she had a cascade of brown hair that rose out of a pair of chopsticks.

  ‘Are you the Police?’ she asked in a broad Cockney accent, her eyes red-rimmed with tears.

  Richard couldn’t work out who else they could have looked like, but he knew that shock affected different people differently, so he decided to make things as simple as possible.

  ‘Detective Inspector Richard Poole of the Saint-Marie Police,’ he said, pulling out his warrant card and holding it up for inspection. ‘I understand there’s been a fatality.’

  ‘It’s my husband!’ the woman blurted. ‘Someone’s shot him. Shot him dead.’

  ‘Then can you please take us to him at once.’

  As the woman led them inside, Richard briefly wondered what a Cockney woman was doing in the Caribbean, but he was soon distracted by the house’s decor. It was all extremely expensive-looking, but it was devoid of colour. The floors, wall, ceilings and all of the furniture were shades of white, grey, brown and black, and there wasn’t a single picture on the wall or personal photo in a frame. The whole house felt like an antiseptic show home that hadn’t been sold yet.

  The woman led them from the cool of the house onto a sun deck that contained an infinity pool as flat and still as a sheet of glass, and which overlooked the wide Caribbean sea beyond. Richard briefly startled
at how bright the sunshine reflecting off the swimming pool was, but he cupped his hand above his eyes so he could see against the glare. The woman continued to lead them away from the house towards a separate building a little way away in the garden that was also constructed from black timber and glass. As she reached it, she stopped on the threshold, her hand clutched to her chest.

  ‘He’s in there, but I can’t go in,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not again.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Camille said.

  ‘My Detective Sergeant will stay with you,’ Richard said, and carried on to the sliding glass door that led into what he could see was a little office. The door was already open, so Richard stepped inside and found his feet disappearing into a lush white carpet. Once again he noticed that there was only the minimal amount of furnishings, and the whole room was dominated by a large desk that was covered in a shiny black veneer.

  There were no signs of a break-in that Richard could immediately see, and nor was there any indication of there having been a struggle. As for where the woman’s husband was, that became apparent as Richard moved around the desk.

  A man was lying on the floor in his pyjamas, and every inch of his upper torso and head was thick with clotted and drying blood. There was blood on his pyjamas, on his hands, in his hair and on his face, and to make the scene all the more macabre, the white carpet was smeared with streaks of blood where the poor man had clearly tried to escape as he expired.

  As Dwayne and Fidel entered, Richard held up his hand for them to pause because there were a few things he wanted to check first.

  Bending down to the body, Richard saw that there were a couple of bullet wounds to the man’s torso, a third bullet wound in the man’s back, but there was also what appeared to be the ‘killing shot’ that had entered above the left ear and gone straight into the brain.

  That made four bullets that had been fired into the body.

  Richard touched the edge of the pool of blood on the carpet and could feel that it was already dry. The man had been lying there for some time. He’d have to get the pathologist to estimate the time of death. But as much as Richard was aware of what he could see, the one thing he couldn’t see troubled him the most.

  Richard looked at the man’s desk. There was a monitor, a keyboard and a couple of pens in a little tray, but what Richard was looking for wasn’t there.

  Where was it?

  Richard bent down to the body again and this time noticed that the man’s mouth was ever so slightly open, as though there was something inside it.

  With one hand he gently prised the jaws open. They were already stiff with rigor mortis, but he was able to slip the finger and thumb of his other hand into the man’s mouth to locate what he was looking for.

  He found it immediately.

  Richard pulled it out and held it up.

  It was a bright red ruby just like the one that had been left at the scene after Conrad Gardiner’s murder.

  Dwayne saw the ruby from across the room.

  ‘No way,’ he said, amazed.

  Richard looked at the ruby, his mind awhirl with appalled possibilities, but there was one thing he was now sure of.

  Pierre Charpentier had struck again.

  I was disappointed he didn’t beg when I pulled the gun. I thought he would, but I don’t think he thought I’d see it through. He thought I was joking. That after all this time, I wouldn’t have the courage. He always was so arrogant. So full of himself. Instead, he asked me where I’d got the gun from and I just laughed and shot him in the shoulder. It was everything I hoped. To put a bullet in him. On an island like Saint-Marie you can get anything, I told him. An unmarked handgun. An untraceable mobile phone. Or two. If I’m honest I don’t think he heard a word I said. Not after I shot him in the other shoulder. It was a nice carpet. Expensive. And the blood came in little spurts through his fingers as he tried to stop the bleeding. That’s when he tried to get away. I had to stifle a laugh as I watched him try to crawl to the door. The third bullet went straight into his back, and his body dropped to the floor, just like that. I bent down. He was still breathing. Just. Thin breaths. The thinnest of thin breaths. His eyes looked at me, and I could see he finally got it. He was going to die. I smiled, put the gun to his temple and blew his brains out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  While Dwayne and Fidel started working the murder scene, Richard and Camille interviewed the woman who’d let them into the house. She told the Police her name was Blaise, and she’d been married to Jimmy Frost – the man who’d been shot dead – for the last eighteen years.

  ‘So how did you and Jimmy meet?’ Camille asked, more as a way of keeping Blaise focused on simple matters than because she needed to know.

  ‘We met in London,’ Blaise said, briefly transported by the memory. ‘At a nightclub. Just gone twenty years ago.’

  ‘You met in London twenty years ago?’ Richard asked.

  Blaise didn’t seem to pick up on Richard’s interest.

  ‘That’s right. I’m from Woodford in East London, so me and my mates would go up West on a Friday night. That’s what we always did. And this really sexy guy came up to me with this amazing Caribbean accent and asked me if I’d ever had a Ti’punch before. Well, I’d not even heard of it, and the barman hadn’t, either. So Jimmy got behind the bar and made it himself. He was amazing. And when he came back to Saint-Marie, I came with him. I’ve not been back to the UK since.’

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, I think I was a bit grand when I first married Jimmy. You know, to my family. Having all this money for the first time. I thought I was a cut above, and we lost touch. So no, I’ve not been back to the UK, and I’ve not spoken to my family in years. Anyway. You make your bed, you lie in it.’

  ‘And this was twenty years ago?’

  ‘Just over.’

  ‘Then can you tell me what your husband was doing in the UK when you met him?’

  ‘Well, he was setting up his first big property deal. So he was only in London for a few weeks. But he explained it all to me. He was going to “strike it big”, and then he was going to come back to Saint-Marie. I found that all very exciting.’

  ‘Did you find out what the property deal was?’

  ‘No. All he told me was that he had three partners, and if the deal came off, it would set him up for life.’

  Richard and Camille shared a glance, knowing full well that if there’d been any doubt that Jimmy had been one of the original jewellery thieves before, there wasn’t now.

  ‘So what happened when you returned to Saint-Marie with Jimmy?’ Richard asked. ‘I take it the big deal worked out?’

  ‘You can say that again. He was cock of the walk. The deal had gone even better than expected. That’s what he told me. So it was party time for the next few weeks. For the next few months, if I’m honest. I met all his friends. And then, a few months later, the money from the deal started to come through, and he was wealthy overnight. Or so he seemed to me. But he didn’t want to spend it all on parties, he told me. So with that money, he bought a plot of land by the cemetery just outside Honoré and built some flats on it. And it was when he sold that first block of flats that the money really started to flow and he hasn’t looked back since.’

  ‘So is that what he does?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Your husband’s a property developer?’ Richard asked.

  ‘You don’t know him?’

  ‘No,’ Richard said.

  ‘He’s Jimmy Frost, of Frost Property Services.’

  Richard and Camille both heard a note of scorn in Blaise’s voice.

  ‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘Then can I ask, what happened today?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Blaise said.

  ‘Perhaps you can tell us the last time you saw your husband?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy. It was last night.’

  ‘At what time?�
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  ‘I don’t know. At about 9pm. We’d had dinner, and he said he was just going to the office to finish up the day’s work.’

  ‘Was that unusual?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Oh no. He liked to check in on his work before bed most nights.’

  ‘So he went to his office outside at about 9pm?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really know. I tried to find something to watch on TV, but there was nothing, so I went to bed. I checked my phone for a bit, and turned my lights off at about ten, I suppose.’

  ‘You went to sleep at about 10pm?’

  Blaise nodded.

  ‘And what time did your husband come to bed?’

  ‘I don’t know. If I’m already asleep, he gets into bed without waking me up. So I don’t always know what time he comes to bed. And this morning, when I woke up, it looked to me like his side of the bed hadn’t been slept in at all. I wasn’t worried at first. I just thought he’d maybe worked late and slept on the sofa in his office. He’s got this little sofa there, and he sometimes sleeps on it if he doesn’t want to come back to the house.’

  ‘So what did you do next?’

  ‘Well, I just got on with my day. I reckoned he’d turn up at some point.’

  ‘You didn’t check on him in his office?’

  ‘No-one checked up on Jimmy. He didn’t like it. And when he still hadn’t turned up by lunchtime, I just thought he must have gone out. Maybe some time in the night. You know, in his car.’

  ‘You thought your husband had “gone somewhere in the night”?’ Richard asked sceptically.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘And was that normal?’

  ‘No, but it’s the sort of thing he’d do. You know, if there’s a problem, Jimmy has to sort it out there and then.’

  ‘So you didn’t see him all morning, and nor did you see him at lunch. What did you do for all that time?’

  ‘I stayed in the house. Reading. Watching TV. Just hanging out. That’s what I do.’