The Killing Of Polly Carter

‘What is it?’

Camille headed down to join her boss, who she could see was standing at the next bend in the steps as they zig-zagged down the cliff face. Here—where the steps turned down for the next flight—some proper bushes had been allowed to grow up to about shoulder height in the red dirt, and Richard was on his hands and knees lifting the lower branches on a particularly vicious-looking thorn bush.

As Camille arrived, Richard called back to her, ‘Don’t come any closer.’

He then reached into the bush and carefully pulled an object out.

It was an old bit of driftwood about four feet long. And it was covered top to bottom in a green moss from being in the sea for so long.

‘Now, can you tell me what a piece of driftwood is doing hidden in a bush halfway up a cliff?’

Richard turned the branch over in his hands. At one end, there was still a bit of wood sticking out at a sharp angle where another section of branch had snapped off. This snapped-off bit of branch was only an inch or so long, but Richard and Camille could both see that there were dark stains on it—and around that end of the branch as well.

As the UV lamp and bottle of Luminol were soon able to confirm, the dark patches around the stubby bit of broken-off branch were blood. And the smears on the rest of the driftwood were also blood.

If this was Polly’s blood, then Richard realised that someone else must have hidden the branch after she’d fallen to her death.

In fact, Richard realised, the find was even more significant than that. His suspicions about Polly’s death had been right all along.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Polly Carter didn’t jump. She was murdered.’

Chapter 3 (#ulink_9b695e0e-47cd-5441-a81d-d2ae7b1bf722)

Giving the branch to Fidel so he could bag it for processing, Richard explained his theory.

‘Putting aside the question of how a piece of driftwood ended up near the top of a cliff, let’s see what this means. Polly argued with her sister in the garden, all the witnesses agree on that. And Polly then said she was going to commit suicide. Well, we only have her sister Claire’s word for that, but we’ve got no reason to disbelieve her for the moment, so let’s say that that’s what happened. In a wild fury, Polly turned to Claire and said she was going to kill herself.

‘Then, rather than just jump to her death from the top of the cliff, she made sure she came down the first flight of stairs and turned the corner so she was now out of sight of her sister. Which brings us to the cut in her arm.

‘Because we’ve almost certainly found the piece of wood that cut her—I’m sure we can all agree on that. So, if this were suicide, Polly must have found the piece of driftwood lying here. She must then have picked it up, and then, for reasons known only to herself, she must have stabbed that sharp bit of the branch into her skin and ripped a vicious cut down her forearm. Which doesn’t seem likely, does it?’

‘It doesn’t, sir,’ Fidel agreed.

Richard indicated the break in the bushes where Polly had fallen to her death.

‘And we know that Polly was bleeding quite heavily when she went over the edge. There’s blood in the dust here where she fell.’ Richard then pointed a good twenty or thirty steps further down the staircase at the bush where they’d found the bloody piece of driftwood. ‘So how did she manage to get to that bush all that way down there, hide the branch in the bushes, and then get back up here without leaving a single drop of blood on the steps in between? And if that’s impossible—which frankly it is, if you ask me—just why would she self-harm herself with a branch, go down the steps, hide the branch, then come back up to here, and only then jump to her death?’

Fidel and Camille could see the logic of what Richard was saying.

‘Which means we’ve got a problem.’

‘It does, sir?’ Fidel said.

‘Because the scene only makes sense if there was someone already waiting here before Polly came down the steps.’

‘You mean the man in the yellow raincoat?’ Camille asked.

‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ Richard said. ‘But whoever it was, they were not only waiting here, but they also had that branch with them. Ready to knock Polly to her death the moment she came round the corner.’

‘Which is why her body fell so far from the cliff’s edge.’

‘Indeed. A whole seventeen feet. She didn’t jump. She was knocked off the steps with considerable force.’

‘And the thing is, sir,’ Camille said, realising the implications of what Richard was saying, ‘I can see why you’d use an old branch to commit the murder. You’d want to keep your distance so the victim couldn’t grab at you and pull you over the edge when she went over.’

‘Good point,’ Richard said.

‘And you’d also want to ensure that none of your DNA or fibres from your clothes got caught under the victim’s fingernails if she fought back.’

‘Yes. That’s true as well,’ Richard said, unable to stop a hint of irritation from slipping into his voice. This was supposed to be his revelation, not Camille’s.

‘But that’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?’ Camille continued. ‘Polly grabbed hold of the branch and cut her arm on it just before she fell.’

‘Yes, very good,’ Richard said, finally interrupting Camille’s flow before she could steal all of his thunder. ‘Because, in any tussle to the death, our killer wouldn’t necessarily have noticed that Polly had cut herself just before she went over the edge. And he or she would then have hidden the piece of driftwood in the bush perhaps without realising that it was now covered in Polly’s blood.’

‘But if the killer didn’t notice the blood on the branch,’ Fidel said, ‘then that suggests that he or she was in a serious rush after the murder.’

‘But that’s not surprising,’ Camille said. ‘The killer must have guessed that someone would have heard the scream as Polly fell to her death. And would come to investigate.’

‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘Which is exactly what happened, isn’t it? Sophie came down these steps only a minute or so later. Which is why we have a problem. Or rather, four problems. Because, firstly, if there was someone already on the steps here—whether it was our man in yellow or someone else—then how on earth did he or she know that Polly would come down these steps at that precise moment? And secondly, what are the chances that Polly would announce that she was going to commit suicide at the precise moment that the killer was planning to commit murder? The whole thing is the most incredible coincidence, don’t you think? And thirdly, and even more impossibly, seeing as we know our killer was on these steps beforehand, how on earth did this man in yellow—or whoever-it-was—then manage to vanish from the cliffs before Sophie got here only a minute or so later?’

Richard looked at Fidel and Camille and knew that they agreed with him. It didn’t seem possible.

‘But, sir, that was only three things,’ Fidel said.

‘I know,’ Richard said, delighted that one of his team had fallen into his trap. ‘Because the last question I’d ask is: why on earth did we find Claire’s phone in a chandelier back at the house?’

There was a moment before either Fidel or Camille responded.

‘You’d ask that as your fourth question, would you, sir?’ Fidel asked tentatively.

‘Of course!’ Camille told him in well-worn exasperation. ‘We’ve got a killer committing murder here, but let’s make sure we work out how a phone got into a light fitting.’

‘Indeed,’ Richard said, entirely delighted. ‘I’m telling you, it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like things that don’t make sense.’

There was a clattering of footsteps from above them and Dwayne appeared around the corner of the stone steps.

‘Oh okay, Chief,’ he said, once he’d regathered his breath. ‘I think this could be murder.’

‘You do?’ Richard said. ‘How gratifying. We’ve just come to the same conclusion. But what have you found?’

Dwayne wanted to show them, so Richard and Camille followed Dwayne back to the house and into a room that Dwayne explained was Polly’s study.

On entering the room, Richard could see that it was identical in shape and size to the sitting room they’d interviewed the witnesses in, with exactly the same floor-to-ceiling windows and curtains overlooking the garden and sea beyond. And with a similarly dusty chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. In fact, the only architectural difference between the two rooms as far as Richard could tell was the fact that one wall of this room had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running down its side that was stuffed with old books, junk and Polly’s mementoes in pretty much any order.

But seeing as it was Polly’s study, there was also an old metal filing cabinet, a desk made from what looked like an old door balanced on trestle tables, a battered old laptop sitting on it among a slew of old bills and unopened post, and various odds and sods of furniture sitting any old way around the room.

‘Okay, so you should know,’ Dwayne told Richard and Camille, ‘I’ve had a good look through the rest of the study, and I can’t find any kind of suicide note anywhere.’