A Meditation On Murder

As Dwayne led Julia off, Richard took a moment to look about himself. The old plantation owner’s house that was now the main hotel building sat in a sea of manicured lawns, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was all wrought-iron balconies and horizontal planks of white-painted wood. But Richard also noted the other structures that were dotted around the hotel’s grounds. There was what looked like a red and gold Shinto shrine off in one clearing; a colonnade of vine-entwined Corinthian pillars straight out of Ancient Greece in another; and, up on a bluff that overlooked the sparkling sea, there appeared to be a Thai temple, with sharply sloped roofs in copper green.

It was all very strange and incongruous to Richard’s mind. As for the hotel’s guests, Richard could see that they’d apparently all vanished into thin air, although—now he was looking—he could see a clump of them down on the beach looking back at him.

Camille came over from the house and Richard went to meet her.

‘Okay,’ Camille said. ‘I’ve sent Rianka—the wife—to her room and I’ve said I’ll go to her as soon as I can. As for the other witnesses, they’re off getting changed into their normal clothes. I’ve then told them to meet by the ambulance so we can take samples.’

‘Good work. Thank you.’

‘But what did Julia say? Is she the murderer?’

‘Oh yes. She’s made a full confession.’

Camille looked at Richard and shifted her weight onto one hip, a suspicious look slipping into her eyes.

‘And yet …?’

‘I don’t know, it’s just she didn’t really make a very good fist at explaining the murder.’

‘She didn’t?’

‘No. For example, she didn’t say she had any reason to want to kill the deceased. In fact, she said how much she liked him. And she claimed she not only hadn’t seen the knife before that she used to kill him, but she had no idea where it even came from.’

‘But she’s the murderer, of course she’d say that. She’s lying.’

‘I know. But seeing as she’s already confessed to killing him, why bother to lie that she doesn’t know what her motive was, what her means were or what her opportunity was?’

Camille could see the logic of what Richard was saying.

‘And she’s also left-handed,’ Richard said.

‘She is?’

‘Or so she says.’

‘Maybe she’s trying to trick you.’

‘Maybe.’

Camille knew her boss well. ‘You don’t think she did it, do you?’

‘I don’t know what I think—but it’s definitely not stacking up. Not yet. Not if she can’t provide us with a decent means, motive and opportunity. And there’s something else as well.’ Richard paused a moment, and then turned back to face the Japanese tea house. ‘It’s this tea house. Because Julia also said Aslan locked her and the others inside it before they started their meditation.’

‘So?’

Richard looked at his partner. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

Camille refused to be drawn, so Richard explained for her.

‘Because who in their right mind would allow themselves to be locked inside a room with four other potential witnesses before committing murder?’

Camille considered this a moment and then said, ‘Oh. I see what you mean.’

‘Precisely. Why not kill him in the dead of night? Or when he’s on his own?’

Richard looked over at the Meditation Space again.

‘If you ask me, there’s something about that tea house that’s important. Something we haven’t realised yet. Either because of how it’s made—or where it’s located—but the victim had to be killed inside it in broad daylight in front of a load of other potential witnesses. Why?’

Chapter Two (#ulink_662cc670-2869-5762-b1e9-4522241a3267)

While Fidel processed the scene, Camille oversaw the paramedics taking the blood samples from the four remaining witnesses, and Richard watched all the activity from the shade of a nearby palm tree. This, in fact, meant standing nowhere near the palm tree in question that was actually shading him, but Richard had long ago learnt that a palm tree’s vertical trunk was too narrow to offer any shade from the blistering tropical sunshine. Instead, his technique was to follow the shade of the thin trunk along the ground until he found the much larger clump of shade that was thrown by the bush of fronds at the top of the tree.

Which is why, at this precise moment, if anyone had been looking, they’d have seen Richard standing in the middle of an entirely sun-bleached lawn apparently in his own personal shaft of darkness. But he wanted to take a moment to watch the four remaining witnesses interact with Camille. After all, they’d just been locked inside a room where a vicious murder had been carried out. How were they bearing up?

To this end, Richard had already got the witnesses’ check-in details from The Retreat’s receptionist.

He could see that Camille was currently talking to a woman he now knew was called Saskia Filbee. The photocopy of her passport had her down as forty-two years old. And according to the hotel’s registration card she lived in Walthamstow and worked as a temporary secretary in London. Like the other witnesses, she’d now changed back into her normal clothes and Richard could see that she’d chosen to put on a sensible A-line dress in dark blue. And he could also see from the way that Saskia listened to Camille with her head cocked slightly to one side that this was someone who was happy being told what to do.

He saw Saskia nod her head and go over to one of the paramedics. Yes, Richard thought to himself, Saskia was a sensible secretary. And she would of course volunteer to give her blood sample to the paramedics first.

Richard shuffled the registration forms in his hand and came up with Paul Sellars and Ann Sellars next. According to their passports, Ann was forty-five years old and had been born in Birmingham. Her registration said she was a housewife and, now that she’d changed into her normal clothes, Richard could see that while she was somewhat plump, she seemed to fizz with the energy of a middle-aged woman who, rather than despair at how she’d ‘let herself go’, had instead decided to embrace this fact.

Gold flashed at the thick necklace around Ann’s neck, her wrists were similarly festooned with glitz, and she seemed to be wearing electric-blue trousers and gold slippers straight out of an Arabian nightmare, a violently fuchsia blouse, and the whole ensemble was finished off with a silk shawl that she wore draped over her shoulders and which seemed to have been constructed from every colour in the world that didn’t actually occur in nature. On it, neon swirls of blue fought with psychedelic greens; and both lost out to attacks of fluorescent yellow.

Richard could see from the way that Ann was now talking to Camille—with almost windmill gesticulations as she pointed from the house to the Meditation Space and back again at the paramedics—that Ann clearly had a personality as colourful and slapdash as her clothes.

He watched as a man wearing tan chinos, brown deck shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt joined Ann. Richard could see from the papers in his hand that this was Paul Sellars, Ann’s fifty-two-year-old husband. He was a pharmacist at an independent chemist’s in Nottingham, where he and Ann lived. And as Paul calmed Ann down, Richard could see that everything Ann was, her husband wasn’t.

For starters, he was rake thin. And almost entirely bald. But it was more than that. It was his manner that was so different. Richard could see that Paul was smooth, conciliatory. In charge. Just a few words into whatever he was saying, Ann quietened down and looked at her husband as though waiting for instruction. And instruction was clearly what he was giving her because, as he pointed off to the paramedics, Ann seemed finally to understand what was expected of her and she went over to give her samples meekly.

Richard saw Camille thank Paul for his timely intervention and Richard then saw him smile briefly and nod once. Paul was clearly a quietly capable person.

Which left only one witness, Ben Jenkins, who Richard had briefly spoken to when he’d first arrived at the murder scene. He could see from Ben’s photocopied passport that he was fifty, had been born in Leeds, but he now listed his home address as Vilamoura, Portugal.

As Richard looked up, it took him a moment to find Ben, but then he saw him standing off to one side in the shade of the ambulance. He wasn’t that tall, and now that he’d been allowed to get back into his normal clothes, Richard could see that Ben wore what looked like white leather shoes, stone-washed blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt in vertical pink and blue stripes that was tucked tightly into a thin belt that cinched him tight at the waist.

Richard thought he recognised the type. Ben had done extremely well in life and was now trying to use expensive clothes and accessories to draw attention away from his increasing girth and decreasing attraction. Looking down at the forms again, Richard saw that Ben had listed his occupation on the hotel form as ‘Property Developer’.

Richard found it interesting how Ben was off to one side. Alone. In fact, as Richard watched him, he found himself noting that Ben seemed to be watching Camille and the others, just as Richard was watching Ben.

Richard made a mental note to keep an eye on Ben Jenkins.

Once the witnesses had finished with the paramedics, Camille moved them to the shade of the verandah and Richard joined them all—but not before he’d sent Camille off to check up on the victim’s wife, Rianka.

‘Thank you for all agreeing to talk to me,’ Richard said to the four witnesses. ‘I know this must have been a very trying time for you all.’

‘That poor man!’ Ann said, throwing her hand to her heaving chest. ‘What do you think he’d done to that girl to make her do that to him? Is she deranged? That’s all I can think. Mentally deficient somehow!’