‘So the next day, I woke up as Conrad was packing for his trip. And he was being such an idiot. Forgetting the cool bag, and leaving his wallet behind. And I found him so irritating that after he’d gone, I began thinking about the Fort Royal. I mean, it’s the best hotel on the whole island. I’d never even been inside it. And all I had to do was go to the reception, and I could spend the day pampering myself? It was such an exciting thought. And I believed Jimmy when he’d said that I could leave before 4pm and it would all be alright. Or I convinced myself I believed him. So I went. Said the codeword Mr Snow to the receptionist. She gave me a key and I went to the suite at the top of the hotel. It was amazing. Huge. And there was a jacuzzi on a balcony overlooking the sea. But I was just there for the spa. And for a bit of pampering. That’s what I told myself. But it kept popping into my mind. That he’d be turning up at 4pm. As he knew it would. After I’d had lunch and a swim, I realised I’d better leave. So I went up to the suite for a quick rooftop jacuzzi, and I had every intention of getting dressed and leaving before 4pm.
‘I don’t know when I decided I was going to stay after all. I’m not sure I even quite made a decision, but I was still in the jacuzzi at 4pm when Jimmy stepped out onto the balcony holding a bottle of champagne and two glasses.’
It was clear from Natasha’s demeanour that modesty prevented her from continuing the story.
‘And . . .?’ Richard asked, his pencil poised.
‘And I didn’t leave until the next morning.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘I had one of the best nights of my life.’
Richard realised that he didn’t quite know what his next question was, so he threw a look at Camille, hoping she’d help him out.
‘Did you see him again?’ she asked as she got up from her desk and came over.
‘Three times,’ Natasha said. ‘Three more times I went to the Presidential Suite, but Conrad got suspicious. He found a bracelet Jimmy had bought me. I said I’d bought it for myself, but he guessed I was seeing someone. And threatened to leave me, can you believe it? Conrad had countless affairs over the years, he spends all his time on his boat, and then when the stupid man notices I’ve found someone else, he’s shocked.’
‘He threatened to leave you?’ Richard asked.
‘That’s what he said. But he wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t have the money to leave me. And anyway, I stopped seeing Jimmy.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He told me he’d had his fun, he was moving on.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that,’ Natasha said sadly.
‘That must have hurt,’ Camille said.
‘It did. But I always knew it was going to end. After all, a man who beds other women while still being married isn’t ever going to be faithful, is he?’
‘And yet you said you loved him,’ Camille said innocently enough, but Richard could see that Camille didn’t feel that Natasha’s story quite added up.
‘I did. I do. For the time we spent together.’
‘When did your relationship with Mr Frost end?’ Richard asked.
‘Only a few weeks after it started. About five months ago.’
‘So how come we found your fingerprints on the glass door to his office?’
Natasha looked uncomfortable.
‘I . . . had a moment of weakness.’
‘You went to see him?’ Camille asked.
Natasha nodded.
‘When was this?’
‘A couple of weeks ago. Conrad was out on his boat, of course, and I realised how alone I was. So I drove up to Jimmy’s house and waited until I could see his wife leaving. I was shocked to see her, I can tell you. She’s so beautiful. I couldn’t understand what Jimmy saw in me. It didn’t make sense. But when she drove off, I went to the front door. It was locked, but Jimmy had told me he worked in an office in the garden, so I went around, and that’s where I found him. In his office. He wasn’t happy to see me, I’m afraid.’
‘He wasn’t?’
‘He was furious I was at his house. He said surely I knew he was married, and the thing is, I realised how stupid I was being almost immediately. He was right. He was married. We’d had our fun, and now we both had to move on. I apologised so much, but it didn’t seem to make any difference, he was just so very angry with me. So I fled, and when I got back to my car, I just burst into tears. I felt so stupid. Why did I have to ruin everything?’
‘Did you see him after that?’
‘No. That was the last time. I promise you. And I have no idea why he died, or who did it, or how it was done.’
‘I see,’ Richard said, and turned the pages of his notes. As he did so, he once again marvelled at how humans seemed hard-wired to lie. After all, if Natasha had just told them all this immediately, she wouldn’t have ended up looking so guilty.
Richard’s eye caught one of the first notes he’d made.
‘You mentioned how the first time Mr Frost came to your house, he was wanting to see your husband?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did you ever find out what that was about?’
‘I don’t think I did.’
‘Then perhaps Jimmy met Conrad at some other time?’
‘He didn’t come to the house again. I don’t think. Not after that time.’
‘Then did Conrad mention Jimmy? Or give any indication as to why he’d perhaps want to see him?’
‘No.’
‘Very well,’ Richard said. ‘Then I’m going to ask you one more question, and I want you to answer it truthfully.’
‘I’ll tell you the truth, I promise you. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Mrs Gardiner, where is Pierre Charpentier?’
Natasha didn’t seem to understand the question.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I believe you know where he is.’
‘I don’t! I hate that man. For what he did to Conrad.’
‘But you and your husband didn’t get on,’ Richard said.
‘So? Didn’t mean I wanted him to die.’
‘And now the man who had an affair with you and then broke your heart is dead at his hand as well.’
‘His death had nothing to do with me. Why won’t you believe me? I’m grateful for everything Jimmy gave me.’
Richard looked at Natasha, and he saw a mixture of confusion, guilt and fear in her face. But had they finally got the truth out of her? That was the question.
Richard dismissed Natasha and then tried to sift through what he’d learned, because there was no doubting that she had a motive to kill both her husband and Jimmy Frost. Conrad for being a bad husband, Jimmy for being the lover who dumped her. And yet, Richard knew, everything about the case suggested that Natasha had nothing to do with either murder. After all, they only happened after Pierre had left prison and learned that there was no money for him. And the fake rubies and physical evidence that bore Pierre’s prints made it clear that he was the person behind both murders.
It was possible, Richard supposed, that Natasha was perhaps in cahoots with Pierre, but that didn’t seem very likely, did it?
‘Okay, team,’ Richard barked. ‘Update me on where we’ve got to with Pierre Charpentier.’
Richard listened to his team’s reports, but it didn’t even begin to improve his mood. Pierre’s name had been put on the Watch List for the airports and the ports, but he hadn’t tried to leave the island. Neither had he tried to set up any bank accounts. Nor had continuing checks at an ever-widening list of hotels, hostels and B&Bs revealed his location. And no-one had yet called in with a positive ID of Pierre, having seen the posters that Dwayne had put up that morning. As for Pierre’s known associates, Dwayne had been to the prison on more than one occasion and tried to lean on the few inmates who’d been closest to Pierre, but they’d had no idea where he was as well.
Increasingly, Richard was sure that someone must be helping Pierre. Someone out there was helping to house, f
eed and water him. But who could it be?
Richard banged his fist on his desk in frustration, and the sudden pain reminded him of two things: firstly, he shouldn’t bang things with his hand, it really hurt. And secondly, the physical pain perfectly mirrored the pain he was feeling at failing to track down an ex-con who had no resources to his name, and yet had managed to commit two murders so far under the Police’s nose without them picking up a single useful lead.
Just where the hell was Pierre Charpentier?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Richard told his team they weren’t leaving the office until they’d found at least one concrete lead that might reveal the hiding place of Pierre. This was something of a mistake because, as the hours passed, and the afternoon sun warmed them all to boiling point, it became harder and harder to concentrate. Tempers were getting frayed.
Richard grabbed his hankie to wipe the sweat from his brow, but the hankie was already so drenched with sweat that he felt he was actually putting sweat back onto his forehead. Before he could stop himself, he wiped his brow with his woollen sleeve, and then looked about himself nervously, hoping no-one else had seen his sudden drop in sartorial standards. As penance, Richard tightened the knot on his tie.
The problem was, there just weren’t any meaningful leads to follow.
Jimmy Frost’s various business dealings were clearly corrupt, but after spending a few hours working through the thicket of his finances, Dwayne gave it up as a bad job, parcelled up all the paperwork he could find, and bagged it for sending to Guadeloupe to be analysed by a forensic accountant. It would take someone far better trained than him to work out where the money was coming from in Jimmy’s empire and where it was going to. For the moment, though, all that mattered was that Dwayne hadn’t been able to find any obvious links between Jimmy and Conrad, or Jimmy and Pierre.
There were also no incriminating texts. No emails. No payments. Nothing. There was just Jimmy’s web history in his browser that made it clear that he’d been following Pierre’s release from prison closely.
As for Jimmy’s relationship with Natasha, Richard emailed a photo of Natasha to the concierge at the Fort Royal Hotel, asking if he recognised her face. Richard’s desk phone rang only moments later, and, once Richard allayed the concierge’s fears that he wasn’t breaching client confidentially, the man said that he was happy to admit he recognised Mrs Gardiner as someone who’d been to the hotel as a guest of Mr Snow. As the hotel prided itself on the bespoke service it offered, he also had a record of the exact days and nights she’d stayed in the Presidential Suite.
Richard was surprised to learn that Natasha had stayed at the hotel with Jimmy on seven different occasions – meaning, she’d not told them the truth when she said she’d only gone there four times, but Richard found it hard to read too much of significance into this lie. After all, the timings of the visits broadly fitted with what she’d told them. They’d all taken place over a five-week period, six months ago.
‘And you’re sure Mrs Gardiner hasn’t stayed at the hotel since then?’ Richard asked.
‘Quite sure,’ the man replied smoothly.
‘Then can I ask, do you by any chance have a Pierre Charpentier staying with you at the moment?’
It was something of a punt on Richard’s part, and he was unsurprised when the concierge reported that they didn’t. In fact, they’d never had a Pierre Charpentier stay at the Fort Royal.
It was another dead end, and Richard was increasingly regretting his threat that he and his team weren’t allowed to leave until they’d found a proper lead.
However, Fidel came to all their rescue when, just after 6pm, he announced that he’d found something.
‘What is it?’ Richard asked eagerly.
‘Well, I don’t know exactly,’ Fidel said, not sure how to begin.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Richard said, ‘just tell us what you’ve got.’
‘Okay, well, I’ve been looking at Conrad Gardiner’s bank statements, seeing as he not only burnt through his share of the robbery spoils, but also Pierre’s as well.’
‘What have you got?’ Camille asked as she, Richard and Dwayne all converged on Fidel’s desk.
‘Well, I’ve got his bank records going back fifteen years. It’s taken some time for the bank to get the documents to me, but they arrived this morning. And in those first bank statements, he’s got over two hundred thousand dollars in his main business account, and quite a few thousand in his personal account. It all looks above board until you notice he’s spending thousands more each month than he’s earning. But it’s not immediately obvious because there are also these cash payments coming into the account every month or so.’
As Fidel said this, he pointed at some payments he’d highlighted in yellow. Each one of these was a cash credit for a figure in the region of five thousand dollars.
‘So he was topping up his bank account with cash?’ Camille asked.
‘But his business wasn’t successful, so where was he getting the cash from?’ Dwayne said.
‘Are you sure he wasn’t selling records or CDs?’
‘One hundred per cent,’ Dwayne said. ‘No shops ever stocked his bands’ music. He sold what he could online. And I don’t think that was very successful. He had a stall at the market once a week so he could sell to unsuspecting tourists. But there’s no way the market stall would generate that sort of income.’
‘So he had a secret supply of cash he could tap into. Which was no doubt Pierre’s share of the robbery. Just like Natasha told us.’
‘How much cash did he pump into the business?’ Richard asked.
‘I added up all these one-off cash payments,’ Fidel said, ‘and they span seven years and come to just under three hundred thousand dollars.’
‘Which is about the same sum of money as Jimmy and Conrad both used to set up their businesses,’ Camille said.
‘So that’s the proof,’ Richard said. ‘Conrad was supposed to look after Pierre’s three hundred thousand dollars, but he embezzled it for himself and used it to prop up his failing business.’
‘And the cash top-ups stop eleven years ago,’ Fidel said, flicking through the pages of the bank statements so he could show everyone. ‘And from that moment on, the business goes into pretty rapid decline.’
Richard could see that the bank statements comprised a long list of debits with next to no credits. And then Fidel pointed to an ‘ACCOUNT CLOSED’ entry. That was just under ten years ago.
‘So he closed down his business ten years ago.’
‘He did,’ Fidel agreed. ‘But that’s not the big news, because then we come to his personal bank statements, and they make very interesting reading. You see, for years after his business folded it’s pretty clear Conrad struggled to keep body and soul together. But there are quite a few one-off credits to his bank account – all from local people.’
‘That’s right,’ Richard said. ‘Stefan Morgan told us he’d employed Conrad to build a store room for him.’
‘Exactly, sir. It’s bits of money here and there. And as far as I can tell, he also did a spell taking tourists out fishing on his boat, although that dried up a few years ago. But check this out.’
As Fidel said this, he turned to the most recent bank statement and pointed at some text that once again said ‘ACCOUNT CLOSED’. But it wasn’t just that, Richard could also see that there had been just over eight hundred dollars in the account at the time, and Conrad had also taken all of that out as cash.
The date for this transaction was the day before Pierre left prison.
‘He cleaned out his account.’ Dwayne said.
‘And then closed it down.’ Camille said.
‘The day before Pierre left prison.’
‘Why?’ Dwayne asked.
‘If you ask me, it suggests he was up to something,’ Fidel said.
‘I’d agree with you there, Fidel,’ Richard said. ‘Dwayne, did any of your contacts give you any indication tha
t Conrad was behaving at all suspiciously before he died?’
‘No,’ Dwayne said. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Okay. Good work, Fidel. Now, I know I said we couldn’t leave before we had a decent lead, but now we’ve got one, how about we all take half an hour to try and find out what Conrad was up to?’
As Richard returned to his desk, he wondered where he could start. After all, what sort of traces did a man who spent most of his time on a fishing boat leave? Richard pulled everything they had on Conrad from the case file, but everything in his recent life seemed above board. His car was insured, he had no traffic offences, and although he didn’t pay anywhere near as much tax as he should, he always filed his tax returns on time. He also didn’t seem to have any share holdings, company directorships, or any connection to any kind of business. Whatever surprising financial behaviour Conrad was getting up to before he died, it seemed to be entirely confined to his personal bank account.
As for his boat, despite how decrepit it had been, it was correctly registered to Honoré harbour, its ownership history was without blemish, and he paid all his mooring fees on time.
So what had he been up to?
Richard had of course checked Conrad’s presence on the Police Computer Network as part of his initial enquiries. There hadn’t been a hit for him. But now, almost on a whim, Richard decided to see if that was also true of Conrad’s criminal record in Britain. After all, Conrad had committed a crime on British soil twenty years ago – what if he’d been back since then? It was something of a longshot, but Richard went to the web portal for ACRO, the British Police’s Criminal Records Office. He was then able to log on and make a basic search through the database for Conrad Gardiner. There were twelve hits, but none of them were for people even close to Conrad’s age.
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