The Killing Of Polly Carter

‘Have you looked on her laptop?’ Camille asked.

‘Just quickly,’ Dwayne said. ‘And there’s no emails in her sent folder, or recently written documents at all.’

‘So what makes you think it was murder?’ Richard asked.

Dwayne indicated the battered filing cabinet, and Richard could see that there was a metal clasp attached to the top drawer, with a combination padlock keeping it shut. Or rather, the lock would have been keeping the drawer locked, but somebody had jemmied the whole clasp from the drawer, and now it hung limply.

‘Someone’s broken into her filing cabinet!’ Richard said.

‘Yeah,’ Dwayne said before coughing a couple of times. ‘That was me.’

‘What?’ Richard said, incredulous.

‘Hey,’ Dwayne said defensively. ‘We’ve got a dead body. I wanted to see what was worth keeping behind lock and key.’

‘But that’s criminal damage!’

Camille wanted to get on, so interrupted. ‘What did you find?’

With a grateful smile to Camille, Dwayne opened the top drawer.

‘Well, for starters, this is where Polly once kept her stash of drugs.’

Richard and Camille were both hit by a pungent smell as they looked inside the drawer and saw a tiny set of brass scales, old spoons that had been blackened from heroin use, cigarette papers, smoke-discoloured bongs, a mirrored tile, and crumbs of hash, brown heroin and white powder dusted everywhere. In a flash of recognition, Richard realised that the mess and fetid stink of the drawer reminded him of his Great Uncle Harold’s pipe cupboard, with its various bits of paraphernalia—from pipe cleaners, to penknives, to old broken pipes and boxes of Swan Vestas matches—but then, it occurred to him, both pipe smoking and heroin abuse were essentially the same thing: drug addiction. It’s just that one of the addictions required considerably more wearing of slippers than the other.

Richard also saw a rusty mortice key sitting on top of a pile of old papers. He fished the key out and saw that it was about as long as his forefinger, had three worn teeth, and was obviously quite old.

‘Now this is interesting,’ Richard said. ‘Who keeps a key locked inside a locked drawer?’

‘Someone who wants to keep a key inside a locked drawer,’ Camille offered, a lot less impressed with the find than her boss.

Before Richard sidetracked them with the key, Dwayne pulled out the pile of papers that were at the bottom of the drawer.

‘But this is what makes me think somebody wanted Polly Carter dead, Chief.’

Dwayne took the papers to the desk and laid them out one by one.

They were each A4 in size and there were six of them. And on each of them was a message that had been made from cutting individual letters out of a newspaper headline and then gluing them to the sheet of A4.

The first patchwork message of cut-out newspaper letters read:

The three police officers looked at each other. Dwayne was right. Someone out there had wanted Polly Carter dead. And now she was.

‘Did you find any envelopes with these notes?’ Richard asked, knowing that with anonymous letters, the most useful clue was often the envelope itself, which could sometimes be handwritten, but was almost always dated and franked with a posting location at least.

‘I looked and couldn’t find any,’ Dwayne said.

‘Then are there any other indicators on the letters themselves as to who sent them?’

‘Not to the naked eye. But this is important, isn’t it?’ Dwayne said. ‘Because, if you ask me, someone who’s prepared to create anonymous messages from newspaper headlines is pretty desperate. And desperate people can end up doing desperate things like committing murder.’

‘I agree,’ Richard said.

There was a sharp ringing from Richard’s inside jacket and he realised that someone was calling his mobile phone. He pulled it out from his jacket pocket and looked at the screen. It was his mother. He checked his watch. Of course. She’d have just landed at the airport.

‘One moment,’ Richard said to Camille and Dwayne, and, trying not to look too guilty—which only made him look guilty as hell—Richard moved off to one side to take the call as quietly as possible.

‘Hello,’ he whispered into his mobile.

Richard listened a moment before replying, ‘Yes, okay. I can be at the airport in half an hour. Yes, okay. Of course. Then I’ll take you to your hotel. Good. Right. Well, I’ll see you then, then. Yes, of course. Half an hour. I’ll see you then.’

Richard hung up his phone and returned to the table so he could look at the anonymous letters, hoping he’d got away with it.

‘Okay, now you’re going to have to tell me,’ Camille said.

‘Tell you what?’

‘Who that was on the phone?’

‘That phone call?’

‘Yes, that phone call.’

‘Oh, no one of note,’ Richard said, looking back down at the threatening letters as though the conversation was now closed.

‘All right,’ Camille said, with a deadly smile. ‘But if you don’t tell me what’s going on, then I’m going to reach into your jacket pocket, pull out your phone and find out for myself.’

Richard looked up from the notes in a panic.

‘I’m sorry? You’d reach into my pocket?’

‘Yes.’

‘And pull out my phone?’

‘Yes.’

Camille just kept on looking at her boss. She knew how this would go.

She wasn’t wrong.

‘Oh all right,’ Richard eventually said. ‘If you must know, my mother’s just arrived at Saint-Marie airport.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Dwayne said.

‘My mother’s come to visit me.’

‘Your mother’s on the island?’