The Killing Of Polly Carter

‘We’re very specifically not saying that,’ Richard clarified. ‘However, we’re not ruling anything out for the moment, either.’

Juliette looked at the police and Richard wondered if there was a hint of triumph in her voice as she said, ‘Search wherever you like.’

As the cottage was small, it didn’t take Richard and Camille long to discover that there wasn’t any kind of yellow raincoat anywhere—and nothing much else of interest, either. Once Richard and Camille had thanked the Moreaus for their time, they went back outside.

‘So what did you think?’ Richard asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Camille said. ‘He seemed shocked. Decent. But there was something about her, wasn’t there?’

‘She was happy enough to stick the knife into the deceased,’ Richard agreed.

Before Richard could say anything more, the alarm went off on his mobile phone—which he was quick to pull out of his pocket and silence.

‘What’s that?’ Camille asked.

Richard knew that it was a reminder he’d set earlier to tell him his mother would be touching down on Saint-Marie in an hour’s time.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he lied.

‘No, I don’t buy it,’ Camille said. ‘You’ve been checking your watch all day, and I’ve never known you set an alarm before. Something’s up.’

Richard looked at his subordinate and knew that he had no quick answer, so he decided that his best course of action would be to pretend that she hadn’t spoken at all. He started walking away from her.

‘Hey!’ Camille called out after her boss, before setting off to catch up with him.

‘I want to see this old smugglers’ path,’ Richard said, as though he weren’t sidestepping Camille’s question.

‘Okay, if you want to be like that,’ Camille said, ‘but I’ll find out what’s going on. You know I will.’

‘Nothing’s going on,’ Richard lied again. ‘But where’s this path?’

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be over by the cliff’s edge, I reckon. If it’s an old smugglers’ path.’

Once they’d passed the border of shrubs and plants that separated the main garden from the cliff top, Camille looked at where the garden stopped and the jungle began.

‘Yes, you can see it there,’ she said, pointing at an old dirt path that was set ten or so feet back from the cliff’s edge—and which started at the edge of the lawn and disappeared into the thick jungle that swept down the headland.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Richard could see the old path as well.

‘And where do you think the path leads?’ he asked

‘All the old coastal paths around here lead back to Honoré.’

As Camille was saying this, Fidel appeared over by the cliff’s steps.

‘Sir, sir, I think I’ve found it!’

Richard and Camille went over to Fidel, and, as the three police officers descended the steps that were carved into the cliff face, Fidel explained how the paramedics had removed the body, and since then he had been trying to identify the place on the stairs from where Polly had jumped.

‘And I think I’ve found it, sir.’

As Fidel said this, he led around the first bend in the stairs, and, just a few steps further on, he pointed at the edge of the step. Richard could see there was a gap in the stubby thorn bushes that ran along the edge of the steps, and the escarpment of red dirt had given away a bit. Edging as close to the vertiginous drop as he dared, Richard looked over and could see that the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the beach below.

Richard looked about himself and saw that this spot on the stairs was, as Claire had said had been the case, just beyond the first turn in the steps as they led down the cliff face. As such, this was pretty much the first place on the whole staircase where a person would have been invisible to anyone standing at the top of the stairs. Or sitting in a wheelchair.

This troubled Richard. After all, why didn’t Polly just jump to her death from the top of the cliff? Or from the first flight of steps? Why did she wait until she’d gone around the first bend and started down the second flight of steps before she jumped?

Putting the thought to one side, Richard looked again at how the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the sand far below, and decided that Fidel was almost certainly right. This was where Polly had fallen to her death. In which case, what had Polly cut her arm on? Richard couldn’t immediately see any blood on the steps or anything obviously woody that might have imparted the green tinge they found on her hands and around the cut in her arm.

Fidel already had the crime scene kit to hand, so Richard got out a spray bottle of Luminol and the portable ultraviolet lamp. If Polly had already been bleeding when she went over the edge—as seemed likely—then there should be evidence of blood spatter on the red earth where she’d gone over.

Richard sprayed a fine mist of liquid Luminol over the dirt where he thought Polly’s blood might have dropped. He then shone the ultraviolet light over the same ground immediately afterwards. Blotches of blood immediately started to fluoresce a purplish silver under the UV light.

‘Okay, so there are drops of blood here,’ Richard said. ‘Good work, Fidel. This is now a secondary crime scene. Please secure and process it. In particular, I want you to check if there’s any trail of blood spots that leads to here, or whether the blood is in fact confined to this one site.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Richard creaked back to a standing position, pulled his hankie from his jacket pocket and tried to wipe the sweat from his face and back of his neck.

Camille could see that her boss was troubled.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Well, don’t those spots of blood strike you as odd?’

Camille had played this game often enough to know that it was quicker if she just pleaded ignorance. ‘No, sir. Not odd in any way. So why don’t you tell me why they’re odd.’

‘Because,’ Richard said, ‘if this blood came from Polly’s wound in her arm—which seems to be a fair working assumption—then where’s the object that caused the cut?’

Camille thought for a moment. ‘Maybe she cut herself elsewhere and that’s where the object still is.’

‘But you’ve seen the blood spatter. It looks as though it’s localised to this one step here.’ Richard looked about himself, nonplussed. ‘Okay, let’s work this through. I think the moss on her arm means that she was cut by a branch or bit of wood.’

‘That seems reasonable.’

‘And it will have to have been of decent size to cause such a deep wound.’

‘That also seems reasonable.’

‘So where is it?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.’

Richard and Camille started looking for any kind of loose piece of wood in the scrubby bushes that ran up and down the seaward side of the stone staircase. For Richard, this task required nerves of steel, if only because it involved going right up to the edge of the staircase—a vertical drop to almost certain death only inches beyond—and then reaching in to the bush to see if there was any loose branch hidden inside. And it really didn’t help that the bushes were all thorn bushes.

Richard called out a sudden ‘Ow!’ for the hundredth time as he removed his right hand from one of the thorn bushes, and Camille found herself having to suppress a smile. Watching her boss in his woollen suit pull thorns from his hand while halfway up a cliff face in the searing Caribbean heat, she couldn’t help but conclude that he was one of the most extraordinary men she’d ever met. And even though she mostly found him stubborn, arrogant and lacking in any kind of human warmth, there was no denying that, as a policeman, he got results. And for that, Camille could almost forgive him all his other personal failings. Almost forgive him.

‘Aha!’ Richard called out from further down the steps.