Murder in the Caribbean

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘And then one day the Police arrived.’

  ‘That’s the moment I’ll never forget. Answering the door to two men in uniform and them pushing past me into my flat. I just stood there, and it was like my whole body froze. My insides drained away. I was terrified.’

  ‘They found the book of stamps.’

  Amy started picking at the paper label on her empty beer bottle.

  ‘They found the book of stamps,’ she agreed.

  ‘And you went to prison.’

  ‘And I went to prison. Although, afterwards was much worse.’

  ‘Leaving prison was worse than being in prison?’

  ‘And prison was bad, don’t get me wrong. But after I left, I was “Amy, who’d been in prison”. Even to people like my mum and my sisters. They never even visited me, can you imagine that? My dad did a few times, but he was too ashamed to come that often. And when I finally got out, I wasn’t welcome back home, that much was made clear to me. But I’d decided in prison that that was it, I wouldn’t break the law again. I was going to get back on track. On my own.

  ‘And it’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. After prison, I was on benefits. I was in debt. But I wouldn’t break the law, that was my only rule. And slowly, over the years, I clawed my way back. And then the year before last, I finally got a proper job at this posh department store on Princes Street. I’m at least ten years older than all the other assistants. They all think I’m this weirdo, and the customers are the worst. Talking down to me just because I’m a shop assistant. But I can handle it. Just about. Because when I’m standing on the shop floor, I know I got there on my own. I did it all on my own.’

  Against his better nature, Richard found himself warming to Amy, just as Dwayne had said would happen. But it wasn’t because he’d finally come to accept that she was Dwayne’s girlfriend and was therefore ‘off the market’, it was because Richard was beginning to realise how hard Amy must have worked to put her life back together. Although he also found that her story prompted an obvious question.

  ‘So what brought you to Saint-Marie?’

  ‘It was a promise I made myself when I left prison. You see, I came here when I was nineteen. Just after I started dealing drugs, and could afford a proper holiday abroad. And I had such a great time, this island really is the best place in the world. Don’t you think?’

  Richard decided that now was not the time to get sidetracked by his opinions of Saint-Marie.

  ‘That certainly seems to be the consensus,’ he said.

  ‘So when I got out of prison I vowed that one day I was going to go on another holiday to Saint-Marie. But this time I’d do it with money I’d earned legally. So it’s always been the prize at the end of the tunnel for me. What I’ve been aiming for. It’s how I’ve put up with working in a department store. And when I’d saved enough money, I told my floor manager I was quitting and going on the holiday of a lifetime. She knew something of my story – you know, that I’d been to prison – and she’s basically the nicest person in the world, so she told me I could rejoin her team when I got back. If I wanted to. I was kind of amazed. But that’s what I’ve noticed over the years. If you have a positive outlook, positive things start to happen to you. Like meeting Dwayne.’

  ‘Like meeting Dwayne,’ Richard said, but a lot less enthusiastically.

  ‘I met him the first night I was on the island, did you know? We just hit it off at once. And best of all, he didn’t want to know about my past, or even what I was up to now. He just wanted to dance and party, and I can’t tell you how amazing that’s been for me. Just being with someone who’s always so happy. And who accepts me for who I am. Because you should know, I’m not really the sort of girl who normally answers the door to strangers wearing only a towel. It’s just the spirit of the island, and how Dwayne makes me feel, that lets me be this relaxed. I love him.’

  Richard really didn’t know what to say to this impossible-to-believe statement, but luckily for him, Amy carried on with her story.

  ‘That’s what I realised real fast. I love him. And it made me sad because I knew there couldn’t be any secrets between us. But I was worried how he’d react if I told him I’d been to prison. I mean, he’s a Police officer. An upstanding member of the community. But I couldn’t lie to him, either. So, one day, I just told him straight up. I’d done time. For dealing drugs and fencing stolen goods. It was terrible, I could feel our whole relationship ending with every word I said. But when I was done, he asked me if I’d broken the law since I’d got out of prison. I told him I hadn’t, and he just said that he didn’t care about my past. Everyone deserved a second chance.’

  ‘He said all that?’ Richard asked, but what he really wanted to ask was, ‘You think Dwayne’s an upstanding member of the community?!’

  ‘He did. But it’s one thing for Dwayne to know about my past, it’s another to know that everyone else does as well.’

  ‘No-one else knows.’

  ‘But you know.’

  ‘I haven’t told anyone. Apart from Camille,’ Richard couldn’t help adding.

  ‘You have told someone?’

  ‘Only my Detective Sergeant. And I’m sure she won’t have told anyone else.’

  Amy looked so very forlorn that Richard felt the briefest stab of guilt.

  ‘You’re just like everyone else,’ she said, and Richard could see that her eyes had filled with tears. ‘When you look at me, you just see someone who’s been in prison. Don’t you?’

  Richard didn’t know what to say, because it was true. Amy had been in prison. He couldn’t help that.

  Amy stood up.

  ‘When you see Dwayne,’ she said, ‘tell him I’ve gone back to my B&B. I don’t think I want to see anyone tonight.’

  And with that, Amy walked out of the bar. As Richard watched her leave, he tried to tell himself that he’d done nothing wrong. That he was in fact in no way implicated in Amy’s sense of hurt and disappointment. After all, he was a Police officer. It was his duty to check that everyone was ‘above board’.

  But as he replayed the conversation to himself, a deeper truth seemed to settle within him. He was to blame. Somehow. In ways he didn’t fully understand. But his actions had made a young woman unhappy and had potentially put a wedge between her and her boyfriend, even though that person was Dwayne. And, as Richard realised how very ungallant he’d been, an even more fundamental realisation came to him.

  He was going to have to make it up to Amy, wasn’t he?

  But how could he possibly even begin to do that?

  Richard Poole picked up his knife and fork and took a first mouthful of egg and chips.

  Like his relationship with Amy – and the murder case for that matter, Richard realised – it was cold.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was a brooding Richard who arrived at work the following morning. This wasn’t just because of Amy’s words the night before, it was also because of what had happened following her exit from Catherine’s, because Dwayne had arrived soon after and Richard had had to tell him that Amy didn’t want to see him that night. Dwayne had been puzzled at first, but as soon as he realised that it was Richard’s presence at the bar that had driven his girlfriend away, he’d got antsy with his boss and left.

  And then, to put the tin lid on it, Camille had turned up to see her mother, discovered Richard sitting on his own, and had then given him an earful about interfering in Dwayne’s love life, and how he had to stop trying to control everyone. When Catherine came past a few minutes later and saw that Richard had barely touched his meal, she tutted loudly and whisked the plate away in disapproval.

  Richard had had to go home hungry, just to get away from everyone in Honoré who seemed to feel he’d let them down. And, as was so often the case with Richard, he decided to displace his feelings of confusion by throwing himself into his work. After all, he still had his notes with him, so he spent the night closely studying the case – and that had been the greatest
frustration of all.

  After all this time, what had they really learned?

  Pierre Charpentier left prison after serving a twenty-year term for robbery and murder. He then met up with his three fellow gang members, Conrad Gardiner, Jimmy Frost and Father Luc Durant, and learned that Conrad had spent the money he should have been keeping safe. Because of that, Pierre threatened to kill Conrad and the other members of the gang. And then, one of the gang returned in a grey Citroën and drove off with Pierre.

  After that, what exactly had happened?

  It was hard to say. All that was known for sure was that someone – Richard could only presume it was Pierre – had later set fire to the grey Citroën. But why exactly? And why exactly in that part of the jungle?

  As for Conrad’s murder three days later, Richard found himself drawn time and again to the fact that Pierre had left a paste ruby behind on Conrad’s desk. In fact, it was this detail that irritated Richard the most. Because, although he’d not told his team yet, the existence of the fake rubies suggested a degree of pre-meditation that seemed entirely at odds with Richard’s belief that Pierre had only decided to commit murder after he’d left prison and learned that his cash had been spent. After all, if Dwayne – with all of his contacts – had spent days trying to find a shop on Saint-Marie that sold fake rubies with no success, where had Pierre got his supply from?

  Richard couldn’t shake the feeling that Pierre must have bought the rubies in advance of his release.

  As for Jimmy Frost’s murder, this had offered up even fewer clues than Conrad’s. Assuming that Blaise could be believed, Jimmy had gone to his office that night, and had then been shot dead at some point before the next morning. There were no witnesses. And, apart from the ruby that was found in Jimmy’s mouth which had Pierre’s fingerprint on, and the fingerprints of Natasha they found at the scene, they’d not been able to identify anything else that was incriminating.

  As for where the gun might have come from that was used to kill Jimmy, Richard imagined that Pierre had got them from a similar source to the hooky mobile phones. As Dwayne was so fond of saying, anyone could lay their hands on an unregistered handgun on the island if they knew who to ask. And, once again, an ex-con who was fresh out of prison would know who to ask.

  And yet, Catherine had also been right, Richard knew. If Pierre was hiding on the island, following the publicity of the case in the newspaper and the posters going up all around Honoré, surely someone would have seen him by now?

  It was possible, of course, just as Catherine suggested, that he was hiding on a boat. So Richard rang the harbour master, and learned two things. The first was that, to his knowledge, there’d been no boat sales in Honoré since Pierre had left prison. And the second was that the harbour master really didn’t like being woken up so early in the morning.

  When Richard checked the Police Computer Network, it confirmed that no boats had been reported as stolen on Saint-Marie in the last few weeks.

  Richard was wondering what to do next when he noticed a single sheet of A4 paper in his in-tray. He picked it up and saw that it was a page of Fidel’s handwriting. As he checked it over, he realised that it was all of Fidel’s research into the people who’d bought the bleached gravel from the Bricolage.

  Richard could see that all of the purchases had been to businesses of one sort or another, and only one of them seemed to have any possible link to the case: Honoré cemetery had bought three tonnes of bleached pea shingle three months ago, and Richard recalled that André Morgan – the man who’d been shot dead in the original robbery – was buried in Honoré cemetery. As Richard remembered this fact, he also remembered that Stefan Morgan, André’s father, had admitted to driving to Honoré cemetery to visit the family crypt immediately after he’d seen Pierre leave prison. He’d said he’d parked up, gone to the family crypt, but hadn’t gone inside. But then, Richard also remembered how Stefan drove a white Nissan car, so how come they found the bleached gravel in the tyre treads of a grey Citroën CX that had been stolen?

  Richard got a box of drawing pins from his desk drawer and went to the large map that was pinned to the wall behind him. Taking out a golden pin, he stuck it in the map at the location of the harbour car park where the grey Citroën CX had been before it was taken. He next found Philippe’s halfway house on the map and stuck a pin in that. Lastly, he found the location where the car had later been discovered burnt out, and put a pin in there as well.

  He then went back to his desk and pulled out a ball of string. Wrapping it around the first pin, he connected the string to the second and third pins to show the rough journey that the car might have taken that day.

  And as he did that, Richard saw something on the map that made his heart race. But he squashed any feelings of excitement, and decided that he had to be methodical. He got Fidel’s list of businesses that had bought the bleached shingle and he worked through the names one by one. First he used the internet to establish their addresses, and next he put a pin in the map of Saint-Marie to see where the businesses was located.

  By the time he’d located most of them on the map, he could see that not one of these new pins lay anywhere near the string that marked the rough possible route of the grey Citroën on the day Pierre disappeared.

  However, Richard had left one business until last.

  It was Honoré cemetery. And Richard didn’t need to look up its location – he already knew where it was – and he also knew that he’d have to move the string a bit to get the pin in, because that’s what Richard had first seen: the cemetery lay on the road that linked Pierre’s halfway house to the jungle where the car was later found.

  In other words, in order for the grey Citroën to have driven from the halfway house to the jungle location where it was later set on fire, it would have had to have passed the cemetery.

  And that’s why Richard’s mind had raced. Because, all of this time they’d been trying to work out where Pierre could have been hiding, but there was one place they’d never considered.

  Honoré cemetery.

  It seemed a touch macabre to imagine Pierre hiding out from the Police in a cemetery, but there was no doubting it would contain dozens of old crypts where Pierre could have hidden himself in some degree of comfort. If he could handle his spooky neighbours, of course.

  Richard left the Police station and got into the Police jeep. As he drove onto the main road out of Honoré, he phoned Camille and told her to meet him at Honoré cemetery.

  She was already waiting for him as he pulled up in the jeep ten minutes later and parked on the gravelled parking area just outside the cemetery’s walls.

  As Richard got out of the jeep, he bent down and hungrily grabbed up a handful of the gravel. It was exactly the same pea shingle as they’d found stuck in the wheels of the grey Citroën.

  ‘I think it’s the gravel we’ve been looking for,’ Richard said.

  ‘But how did you work it out?’ Camille asked, quietly amazed. ‘And does that mean the grey Citroën came here before it got torched?’

  ‘I think so. But let’s see if we can find out for sure.’

  Richard directed Camille to the old iron gate that led through the whitewashed wall. ‘But I should point out there’s a possibility that Pierre’s hiding somewhere in here.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I think it’s a distinct possibility.’

  Stepping through the gate, Richard stopped, somewhat assaulted by the hundreds of apparently haphazard crypts, all tiled in black and white squares, and all arranged around a loose network of dusty paths. None of the crypts was in any way the same as its neighbours, so they were all different sizes and shapes, and to make the visual jumble of structures even more unsettling for someone of Richard’s organised mind, there were mirrors, brightly coloured candles, handmade statues, gaudy plastic flowers and other random artefacts and keepsakes perched on every spare surface or hanging from tiled roofs and windows.

  ‘Now, how c
an we tell if any of the buildings are currently occupied?’ Richard said.

  ‘Occupied by the living rather than the dead,’ Camille whispered back at him.

  Richard ignored his partner as he started to head up the central avenue. ‘There’ll be obvious signs of habitation. We just need to look for them.’

  ‘You’re no fun sometimes, you know that?’ Camille said as she followed.

  For the next few minutes, Richard and Camille wandered among the crypts, although Richard was getting increasingly irritated by the way Camille kept stopping to read the enamelled plaques and painted wooden boards that detailed the virtues of those who had died.

  Richard was relieved to see that most structures weren’t actually large enough for someone to be hiding inside, and those that were had been bricked up or sealed in such a way that it was pretty clear no-one had opened them recently.

  As he headed up the hill, Richard made sure he didn’t wander too far from the central avenue because there was one building he was keen to inspect, and that was the crypt that belonged to Stefan Morgan’s family.

  Richard had already identified that there was one structure in the whole cemetery that was grander than all of the others, and it was just off the main avenue. As he approached, he couldn’t help but feel that – finally – here was a building that looked as though it might pass muster with the local building authority inspector with only the smallest of bribes and a nudge and wink. The crypt had two floors and a pitched roof – and together with the outside staircase, arched openings on the first floor, and alternating black and white tiles plastered to every inch of the structure, the whole thing looked like a crazy Escher drawing made real.

  Richard saw a narrow staircase that led down to an iron-grilled door that had ancient plaques screwed to the wall all around the frame. Heading down the steps, Richard saw that most of the plaques were dedicated to various members of the Morgan family. So this was it, Richard thought to himself, impressed. The Morgan family crypt was by some distance the grandest in the immediate vicinity.