Murder in the Caribbean

by Robert Thorogood

  As Richard said this, a very exhausted Dwayne and Fidel clumped into the room.

  ‘Ah, Dwayne, Fidel!’ Richard called out. ‘What did you get from the scene?’

  ‘Which one?’ Dwayne said and slumped into his chair. ‘Father Luc’s? Or Pierre Charpentier’s?’

  Richard had some sympathy for his subordinates, as he’d certainly never had to process two separate murder scenes on the same day before. However, Richard also knew that sympathy would have to wait.

  ‘If you could just tell me what you’ve got?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, pulling a notebook from the top pocket of his shirt. ‘I’m not sure we got anything from either. Or nothing obvious anyway. But starting with Pierre Charpentier, it was a pretty grim process getting his body out of that coffin.’

  ‘Sarcophagus,’ Richard couldn’t help but correct.

  ‘But you should know, we found the bullet that killed Pierre under his head. It had gone straight through his skull and out the back.’

  ‘Suggesting he was still alive when he got into the sarcophagus,’ Dwayne said with raised eyebrows. ‘Imagine what that was like. Being held up at gunpoint, being made to get into a stone coffin, lying down, and then you’re shot dead.’

  ‘But it fits with the M.O. for Father Luc, doesn’t it?’ Richard said. ‘He was held up at gunpoint and made to do something he didn’t want to do as well, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Camille agreed.

  ‘Then what about time of death for Pierre?’

  ‘It wasn’t possible to tell. But there was a considerable amount of maggots and pupae on the body, sir. We’ve alerted the Forensic Entomologist on Guadeloupe. He should be able to work out how many cycles of life the blow flies had been through, and give a rough time of death that way.’

  ‘Good. Then what else did you find?’

  ‘Well, sir, the lock and bars to the crypt were all so rusty, we don’t have the right equipment to lift fingerprints. And the same was true inside the crypt. All the surfaces are all so old and rough, we aren’t able to dust for prints at all. Mind you, it’s possible the latest equipment might be able to help, but we don’t have anything like that on the island.’

  ‘So we just sealed the crypt back up,’ Dwayne said with the hint of a challenge in his voice. It was clear that he felt that it was all they could do, and he didn’t want his boss to start criticising them for sloppy Police work.

  As for Richard, he had sympathy with Dwayne’s frustration. After all, he’d also been inside the crypt, and he knew that they didn’t have anything close to the necessary forensic facilities to process the scene to the highest standards.

  ‘We could try putting in a call to Guadeloupe?’ Camille said.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Richard said. ‘Have any of the crime fighting agencies on Guadeloupe ever spared any us any of their manpower or equipment before?’

  Richard’s team all knew the answer to that question. Unfortunately for them, the Saint-Marie Police Force was considered such a small outpost on such a tiny island, that all of the money and resources of the bigger islands were always focused on fighting crime locally.

  ‘Okay,’ Richard said, wanting to move the conversation on. ‘Then what about the scene of Father Luc’s murder?’

  ‘That’s just as professionally clean, if you ask me,’ Dwayne said. ‘No tracks in the sand outside the house, other than those from the Police jeep. And there aren’t even any neighbours to ask if they saw or heard anything.’

  ‘But this is crazy,’ Richard said. ‘How can we solve any of these murders if the killer’s leaving the scenes completely clean?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy, Chief,’ Dwayne said.

  Everyone turned and looked at Dwayne in surprise.

  ‘What?’ Dwayne asked, once he realised everyone was looking at him. ‘Oh, you want to know how I know we’re going to solve it? With logic, Chief. That’s how you solve everything. So what’s the one thing that’s bugging you about this case?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy enough. If the four original gang members are dead, who’s the killer?’

  ‘No, not that. That’s just something you don’t know the answer to just yet. What’s really bugging you?’

  ‘But what do you mean, “bugging me”?’

  ‘What’s the thing that makes you go, “but it just doesn’t make any sense”?’

  As Dwayne spoke, he lifted his arms in a passable impression of an out-of-control marionette. Richard was only dimly aware that Dwayne seemed to be doing an impression of him, because he was already trying to identify the one paradox or inconsistency at the heart of the case that was troubling him more than anything else.

  And then he got it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Since you’re asking, the one thing that’s bugging me right now is how the killer knew where Father Luc was hiding. Because Luc knew his life was in danger, didn’t he? That’s why he came to see us. And seeing as he knew what danger he was in, I just don’t believe he’d inadvertently tell anyone where he was going to hide. And yet the killer knew where to find him. As you say, Dwayne, it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Then make it make sense.’

  ‘You mean, maybe the Bishop or someone in his office is the killer? Or tipped the real killer off?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very likely, Chief. So rule it out. Be logical. And then ask the question again. How did the killer know?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  As Richard said this, he threw his hands up in the air in exasperation, and he had a slow realisation that that’s why Dwayne had done his ‘drunken marionette’ impression.

  ‘Then start again,’ Dwayne said, pointing his finger at his boss. ‘No matter how crazy or outlandish your theory is, there has to be a way for the killer to have known where Father Luc was going.’

  Richard exhaled. It was all very well Dwayne having this blind faith in his powers of deduction, but some things just never made any sense. ‘Unless . . .?’ Richard found himself thinking. ‘Unless’ what? There really was no way the killer could have known where Father Luc had gone into hiding.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ Richard said. ‘And that’s what’s bugging me.’

  As Richard said this, a thought occurred to him.

  He dismissed it almost as soon as it arrived.

  And yet, if it was correct, it would explain how the killer would have known where Father Luc had gone to hide. And it would also explain a whole host of other anomalies in the case, Richard realised in mounting excitement.

  ‘I think you’re right, Dwayne,’ Richard said. ‘I need to focus on what’s bugging me.’

  As he said this, Richard opened his top desk drawer and looked inside. What he was looking for wasn’t there. So he opened another drawer in his desk, pushed the contents around, and was just as quickly disappointed.

  ‘Sir?’ Camille asked.

  ‘Hold on,’ Richard said as he pulled all of the drawers of his desk open one by one, rootled around inside, but continued to be foiled. So he stood up from his chair, turned it over and placed it upside down on the floor.

  ‘Sir?’ Camille said, now very definitely confused.

  ‘I asked not to be interrupted, Camille.’

  Richard picked up his keyboard and looked underneath it. And then he did the same to his computer monitor, his phone – and then he took his pen tidy and spilled all of his pens over the desk.

  Camille didn’t say another word. How could she? Like Dwayne and Fidel, she was agog. Had their boss just wilfully scattered pens over his desk?

  Within a few seconds, the team were looking back on the whole ‘pen scattering’ episode as a halcyon time of peace and tranquillity, as they watched their boss pick up his ‘In’, ‘Out’ and ‘Pending’ trays from his desk and tip their contents onto the desk – before checking over the tray itself. Finding it disappointing, Richard dropped the whole thing to the floor, and then got on his hands and knees and checked the underside of his
desk. He then stood up again and didn’t even seem to notice the patches of dust on his knees as he moved to the filing cabinets to the side of the room and started opening drawers. And, having satisfied himself that what he was looking for wasn’t inside the filing cabinets either, he started to check through the clutter of the broken office equipment that was heaped on top.

  And then Richard stopped dead in his tracks as he looked at an ancient fax machine that was sitting on a filing cabinet. Or rather, his team noticed, their boss wasn’t looking at the fax machine. He was looking at a USB charger that was plugged into a wall socket just to the side of the machine.

  The USB charger looked entirely unremarkable. It was made of white plastic, and it had two sockets in it that currently had no USB cables plugged into them.

  Richard held up his finger for silence, not that any of his team would have dared speak at this point. They could see from their boss’s boggle-eyed concentration that the stakes were, for some reason, sky high.

  Richard returned to his desk and picked up a graphite puffer from among the detritus he’d tipped from a drawer. His team were surprised. Why did their boss want to start checking for fingerprints now?

  Richard returned to the USB plug, held the puffer up to it, gave one clean puff on the plastic bulb and a spray of graphite powder briefly engulfed the USB plug.

  Having done this, Richard didn’t move. Not for ten seconds. Not for thirty. He just stared transfixed at the USB plug. Just as his team were staring transfixed at him.

  ‘Fidel?’ Richard eventually said, his eyes still firmly fixed on the charger. ‘We need to fix the ceiling fan.’

  This wasn’t quite what anyone expected Richard to say.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ Fidel said.

  ‘We need to fix the ceiling fan. Don’t we?’

  Richard’s team knew that their boss had been trying to get the wonky ceiling fan mended ever since he’d first arrived on the island. But why would he mention this fact now?

  ‘Er, yes, I suppose that’s right.’

  ‘Then get the ladder and make a start, would you?’

  ‘You want me to fix the ceiling fan now?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘. . . Okay.’

  ‘But I suppose the first thing you’ll have to do is isolate the circuit.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dwayne, go and trip the electrics, would you? So it’s safe for Fidel to work on the ceiling fan.’

  Dwayne didn’t move, but Camille’s eyes lit up as understanding came to her.

  ‘Yes, go and turn the electricity to the station off,’ she said, before turning back to look at her boss. A silent message seemed to pass between them both. They understood each other.

  Dwayne shook his head to himself. Sometimes there was no getting ‘management’. He went through the bead curtain that led to the cells, found the ancient fuse board to the station and called out that he was about to turn the power off.

  The moment Dwayne cut the electricity to the building, Richard yanked the USB plug from its socket, put it on his desk and grabbed up a tiny screwdriver.

  ‘What are you doing, sir?’ Fidel asked.

  ‘Not now,’ Camille said as she pulled out her phone, turned on the torch function, and pointed the light at the plug so Richard could see better.

  ‘Thanks, Camille,’ Richard said as he finished unscrewing the second of the two tiny screws. As it dropped to the desk, Dwayne ambled back through the bead curtain.

  ‘Okay, someone’s got to tell me what’s going on,’ he said.

  Richard popped the back from the USB plug and they could all see for themselves.

  ‘You were right, Dwayne,’ Richard said. ‘I just had to work out what was bugging me.’

  Inside the plug were all the usual circuits of a piece of electronics, but there was also something else that really shouldn’t have been there.

  It was a SIM card.

  The device wasn’t just a USB charger.

  Someone had been bugging the Police station.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A few minutes later, Richard had noted down the identification numbers for the SIM card, put it back inside the plug and then slotted it back into the wall socket. Then, once Dwayne had turned the electricity to the station back on, he and his team went through a charade of congratulating Fidel for mending the ceiling fan before they all decided that it was probably time to retire to Catherine’s bar for an early evening drink.

  Once there, Richard’s team wanted to know how he’d worked out the USB plug was fake.

  ‘I didn’t know for sure,’ he said. ‘Other than the fact that it was the only thing in the vicinity that wasn’t covered in years’ worth of dust. And when I sprayed it with graphite powder, I saw it didn’t have a single fingerprint on it. That’s what clinched it. After all, how is it possible to plug something into a wall socket without leaving a fingerprint on it? But you realise what this means, don’t you? I was right. Father Luc’s not the killer.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘It’s simple. All four of us saw Father Luc every second he was in the Police station, didn’t we?’

  ‘I reckon so,’ Dwayne said.

  ‘And did he at any time stick a USB plug into the wall?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘And has he visited the Police station before or since?’

  ‘He hasn’t.’

  ‘But, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘none of the suspects has been in the station apart from Father Luc.’

  ‘But don’t you see what this really means?’ Richard said, interrupting his team. ‘All along, that bug’s allowed the killer to be one step ahead of us. But now we know about it, we’re one step ahead of him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Fidel asked.

  ‘Because we know that he’s listening in on us. But he doesn’t know we know.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean!’ Fidel said excitedly.

  ‘And that means we can finally turn the tables on him. Or her, of course. Because I think the existence of this bug proves categorically that we haven’t yet caught our killer.’

  ‘But who could it be?’ Fidel asked. ‘All the members of the gang are dead.’

  ‘Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Whoever it is, they think their job is done, don’t they? I mean, all four members of the gang are, as you say, dead. And the killer’s even managed to make it look as though Father Luc is responsible for the murders. Job done. Their guard will be down.’

  ‘But how can we use the bug to catch them?’ Camille asked.

  Richard didn’t have a ready answer, so he told his team that he was going to go back to the station to work through all of his case notes. After all, as he saw it, now that he knew that the killer had been listening in on them, he backed himself to find some information – or loose end – that he could use to make the killer reveal himself. Fidel and Camille both offered to accompany Richard, but he wouldn’t let them.

  ‘I don’t think so, considering the circumstances,’ Richard said as he got up from the table. And then, to the general bafflement of his team, he announced that ‘loose lips sink ships’ and left the bar.

  Once back at the station, Richard realised he first had to tidy his desk before he could get any work done. What was more, he’d have to do so silently, as he didn’t want the killer hearing that anything out of the ordinary had happened, beyond a bit of routine maintenance on the ceiling fan. So Richard started silently reconstructing his desk, and, as was so often the case when doing displacement activity, he found his mind skipping through the case as he did so.

  If the killer wasn’t one of the original gang, then that meant that there was a fifth person out there who wanted all four members of the original gang dead. But who could that be?

  Seeing as his desk was now covered with a fine powdering of dust, Richard got a bowl of hot soapy water from the kitchenette area. Once he’d returned to his desk, he started wiping it clean, revealing
the tired leather underneath. As he did so, Richard tried to imagine all the hundreds – no, thousands – of cases that had been solved at this one desk.

  He found the act of cleaning therapeutic, and while he worked, his mind continued to drift over the case. In particular, he found himself remembering how the Commissioner had said something that had seemed to resonate with him. But what was it? Casting his mind back, Richard recalled that he’d had the feeling when Selwyn had talked about where a priest might have bought fake jewels for his robes.

  And then, precisely because he wasn’t thinking about it too hard, it came to him.

  The exact point that had niggled him.

  Richard wrung the filthy water out of his dusty cloth, but he was no longer in the Police station, he was a streak of pure thought flashing through the case. And everywhere he alighted to check out his new and incredible theory, it was as though he was seeing the case in Technicolor for the first time.

  Everything now made sense.

  But how to check if his theory was correct?

  Well, that was easy enough, Richard realised.

  Richard fired up his computer and looked up a phone number online. He checked his watch, and was pleased to see that it wasn’t too late. He then picked up his desk phone and dialled the number on the screen.

  A man answered the call, and Richard soon explained who he was and why he was ringing.

  ‘Tell me,’ Richard said, knowing that the question he was about to ask would possibly reveal the identity of their killer, ‘do you sell fake plastic jewels?’

  ‘Fake plastic jewels?’ the man replied, surprised by the question.

  ‘That’s right. You know, fake jewels made of plastic. For costumes and so on. To be more specific, do you sell quite large and gaudy plastic rubies?’

  There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then the man said, ‘As it happens, we do. Would you like to buy some?’

  A surge of adrenaline rushed through Richard, but he also knew that he had to be careful – the killer was still listening.

  ‘You don’t sell them?’ Richard said into his phone.

  ‘I said we did. We’ve got a number of different jewels. Fake rubies, fake emeralds, fake diamonds and so on.’