The Killing Of Polly Carter

As Jennifer said this, Richard saw a pair of passing nuns in wimples look over in shock and then skitter off in a panic.

‘But you should know,’ Jennifer finished, ‘I’m here to have a holiday whether you’re free to be a part of it or not.’

‘No. Of course. What hotel are you staying in, and I’ll take you there,’ Richard said.

On the drive to the hotel, Richard and his mother exchanged pleasantries. He heard about Beth from number seven and the problems she was having with her son-in-law. He then heard the story of Professor Brodowski’s cat. You remember Professor Brodowski? Lives in number eleven? Has the daughter with the lazy eye? It was the typical flotsam and jetsam of life in his mother’s close, and Richard was able to keep up his end of the conversation without having to engage his brain too much. This allowed him to become enveloped by an increasing sense of unease as the journey progressed, if only because in all of his forty-four years, he’d never known his mother spend a single night away from his father. And now she’d booked a whole holiday on her own, and on the other side of the world at that. What was going on?

Once Richard made sure that his mother was comfortable in what had turned out to be a far more top-end hotel than he was expecting, he made his apologies and returned to the police station.

‘So what have you got?’ Richard shot at his team as he strode back into the swelteringly hot station.

Dwayne, he saw, was on the phone, Fidel was dusting Claire’s mobile phone for fingerprints, but Camille was at the whiteboard writing up the details of the case.

‘So how’s your mother?’ she asked him. ‘Safe flight?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Richard said as brusquely as he could. He was not going to be sidelined by familial chit chat. ‘So did you manage to process the anonymous letters we found in the victim’s filing cabinet?’

Camille looked at her boss tolerantly, accepting that he was refusing to play ball.

‘I took digital photographs of the front and back of all six letters for our records, but have sent the originals to the labs on Guadeloupe for analysis. We’ve also bagged and sent over the branch we found at the scene and which was covered in blood. And Fidel has also sent samples of the blood spatter he found in the dirt at the jump point.’

Richard smiled tightly, as ever, deeply frustrated that Saint-Marie was too small an island to have any crime scene labs of its own.

‘Thank you. Then how about you, Fidel? How are you getting on?’

‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, looking up from where he’d been dusting Claire’s mobile phone on his desk. ‘First I tried dusting the key you found in the victim’s filing cabinet, but it’s so rusty and old, it’s not possible to raise a single print.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then could I have it, please?’

Fidel reached over to a small plastic tray where the key was sitting. He picked it up and handed it to Richard. Richard looked at it again, trying to divine its meaning, and then, with a disappointed tut to himself, he slipped the key into his trouser pocket.

‘But since then, I’ve been lifting fingerprints from Claire’s mobile phone that you found in the chandelier, and matching them with the exclusion prints we took from the witnesses.’

‘So whose prints are on the phone?’

‘I’ve only been able to raise twelve clear fingerprints. The rest of the phone is just a smear. And while eight of the fingerprints belong to Claire Carter, the remaining four fingerprints belong to her sister, Polly.’

‘I see,’ Richard said, working through the logic of what this might mean. ‘So, as there’s no way Claire could have put the phone in the chandelier herself—seeing as she’s confined to a wheelchair—that either means that it was put there by Polly, or her fingerprints just happened to be on the phone anyway, and it was put there by someone else who was wearing gloves so they didn’t leave their prints on the phone.’

‘Exactly, sir,’ Fidel said.

Richard considered what Fidel had just told him, and then decided it was time to get on.

‘So, Polly Carter!’ he said, indicating the notes Camille had written up on the whiteboard. ‘A world-famous super-model is at home with her sister, Claire Carter; Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel; her manager, Max Brandon; her friend and film director, Phil Adams. Oh, and her live-in home help Juliette and Alain Moreau are also in the picture, although they say they were both elsewhere at the time of the murder.’

‘Assuming they’re telling the truth,’ Camille pointed out.

‘Indeed. Anyway, we know that Polly was a tricky woman to work for—according to Juliette, her home help. Although she could also be generous, according to her husband, Alain.’

‘And she could be hyper one minute and depressed the next,’ Camille added. ‘According to Max, her agent.’

‘And way too trusting, according to her good friend, Phil.’

‘She just sounds like your typical self-centred celebrity,’ Dwayne summed up for them all.

Richard looked at Dwayne in mock surprise. ‘You know about the world of celebrities, do you, Dwayne?’

‘I know it’s not healthy,’ Dwayne said. ‘And if Polly’s been famous since her early twenties, she’s going to have a pretty warped view of the world, I can tell you that much, Chief.’

‘Very well. So that’s our victim. And this morning, she went for a walk with her sister, Claire.’

‘Even though this was the first time she’d been out for a walk with her sister on her own,’ Camille offered.

‘Quite so,’ Richard agreed. ‘And, according to Claire, once they were in the garden, Polly started losing her temper with her. And then—again, according to Claire—Polly took Claire to the top of the cliffs and threatened to kill herself before then going down some of the steps and throwing herself to her death. However, the wooden branch we later found covered in blood at the scene suggests that that’s not quite what happened. In fact, what the branch suggests is that someone was already waiting on the steps before Polly had arrived.’

‘The man in the yellow raincoat,’ Dwayne offered.

‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘But whoever this person was, they attacked Polly with the branch, knocked her to her death, and then hid the branch before making their escape. Somehow. But the point is, we already know from the anonymous letters that there’s already one person out there who wanted Polly Carter dead, so I want background checks run on Polly Carter and everyone who was up at the house. Who benefits from her murder? Who’d want her dead? I also want us chasing the autopsy on her body. If she was attacked by someone wielding that branch, I bet there’ll be further evidence on her body.’

‘And there are your questions from earlier,’ Fidel offered.

‘Indeed, but I think I’ve got a slightly different set of four questions now,’ Richard said, turning back to the board and writing up a list in his neat handwriting.

Once he’d done so, he stepped away from the board so his team could see what he’d written.

The Key Questions

1. How did the killer know to be on the cliff at that precise moment?

2. How did the killer vanish into thin air afterwards?

3. Why was Claire’s mobile phone found in a chandelier?

4. Who sent the anonymous letters?

‘And you know what?’ Richard said, putting the lid back on his whiteboard marker with a satisfying pop. ‘I think that if we can answer those four questions, we’ll stand a good chance of identifying who killed Polly Carter, knowing just why she had to die, and—above all else—just how the killer escaped afterwards without being seen. Now then, team, let’s get to work.’

Chapter 4 (#ulink_3328cf0d-10dc-56f7-8e79-3eb097b7fbe6)

The following day, Richard was sitting at his desk trying to focus on work, but his mind kept drifting back to the dinner he’d had with his mother the night before. It’s not that she’d been difficult in any way—if anything, she’d wanted only to talk about Richard’s life on the island—but, as an experienced copper, Richard got the impression that his mother was being evasive somehow. There’d been a reserve in her eyes he couldn’t place. And Richard’s disquiet was stirred further by the way his mother seemed to deflect any questions he asked about his father. ‘Oh you know what he’s like,’ she’d just said brightly, without any real meaning to her words at all.

But perhaps most unsettling of all, Richard had discovered that his mother didn’t have any set plans for her visit, and he’d never known her travel anywhere without detailed notes and pre-planned itineraries. Instead, she told him that there was a lovely boy she’d met on reception called Karl who was putting together an itinerary for her, starting with a tour of a local rum distillery the following morning.

In short, the whole evening had been quite peculiar for Richard, and as he’d pecked his mother on each cheek to bid her goodnight, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been ‘played’ somehow.