Murder in the Caribbean

CHAPTER TWO

Richard returned to the main room of the house and explained what he’d just seen.

‘I don’t understand,’ Natasha said. ‘There’s been a break-in?’

‘It’s how it looks,’ Richard said, and then he asked Natasha what the room was usually used for.

‘It’s Conrad’s. His den. It’s where he likes to go. You know, when he wants some peace and quiet.’

‘Then can I ask, have you been in his room today?’

‘No. Conrad doesn’t like me going in there.’

‘Do you recall hearing the sound of glass smashing at all today?’

Natasha rose from her chair.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘If you could just answer the question.’

Natasha looked to Camille for support, and she nodded kindly, which seemed to give her strength.

‘Okay. Well, no, I didn’t hear any glass smashing today.’

‘Thank you. And have you been in the house all day?’

‘I’ve been cross-stitching a kneeler for the church.’ As Natasha said this, she indicated some brightly coloured threads that were piled on an occasional table nearby.

‘I see. You’re involved in the local church?’

‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

Richard didn’t quite know how to reply, if only because he always felt a touch bashful that religion had never quite ‘taken’ for him. As he tried to think of a suitable reply, Camille stepped in.

‘And what church do you belong to?’

‘Father Luc Durant’s. He’s such an impressive priest. Don’t you think?’

Richard had no idea who Father Luc was, but he recognised that he was in danger of losing control of the interview entirely.

‘Then can I ask,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t hear any glass smashing, and you were here all morning, what time did you leave?’

‘How do you mean?’ Natasha asked.

‘Well, we first met you at the harbour. So when did you leave your house for the harbour?’

Natasha frowned as she considered her answer.

‘That’s easy enough to explain. I left when . . . you know, I heard the . . . the boat . . .’

‘You heard the explosion?’

‘Not that I knew what it was. It was just this terrible noise.’

‘What time was this?’

‘It was just after eleven, I think. I was listening to the news on the radio.’

‘And then what did you do?’ he asked.

‘Well, I got on with cross-stitching. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. But about five minutes later, Morgane Pichou came and knocked on my door. You know Morgane? She runs the tourist centre in Honoré. Anyway, she said she’d been down at the harbour when the explosion happened, and she’d heard that it was Conrad’s boat that had just . . . well, that it had just happened to. I didn’t know what to think. And then my phone rang. It was the harbour master, Philippe. He said I should come down to the harbour at once. There’d been an accident. I still didn’t believe it could be true – I still don’t believe it . . .’

‘So what time did you get down to the harbour?’ Richard asked, aware that Natasha was about to start crying again.

‘I don’t know. Twenty past. Something like that.’

‘And just to be clear, you were definitely in the house the whole morning before the explosion?’

‘Yes.’

Richard paused to collect his thoughts, because this meant that if Natasha could be believed, the break-in must have happened after she’d left her house following the explosion. After all, if it had happened at any time before, she’d surely have heard the glass smashing. But what sort of person would break in to Conrad’s house after his boat had just exploded? Were the two facts connected, or was it just a coincidence?

‘Mrs Gardiner, could you follow me?’ Richard asked, before leading Natasha and Camille into the corridor where Conrad’s room was. As he pushed the door open, Natasha gave a little gasp and her hand shot to her mouth.

‘Is this a surprise to you?’

‘Of course,’ Natasha said, deeply shocked. ‘I mean, Conrad’s not the tidiest person, but he’s not this bad. Everything’s been thrown onto the floor. Hasn’t it? And the window’s been smashed.’

‘I think it was smashed with that piece of concrete there,’ Richard said, indicating the chunk in the middle of the room. ‘Which is why I was asking if you’d heard the sound of any glass smashing today. I think it would have made a considerable noise when that rock came in through the window.’

‘Of course. I didn’t hear any smashing this morning.’

‘Can you see if anything’s been stolen?’

Natasha scanned the room from the doorway.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t say Conrad had anything worth stealing.’

‘Then can you tell me if this belongs to him?’ Richard said, entering the room and going over to the table where the bright red ruby was sitting.

‘What is it?’

‘It looks like a ruby.’

Natasha’s expression of concern briefly froze, and Camille and Richard exchanged a glance – both knowing that the ruby had just registered with her.

‘A what?’ Natasha asked.

‘A ruby,’ he replied.

Natasha didn’t speak for a few moments.

‘Does it mean anything to you?’ Camille asked as kindly as she could.

Natasha seemed to come to a decision.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘But you’re saying it’s a real ruby?’

‘I don’t know,’ Richard said. ‘I doubt it. It would be worth millions.’

‘Then I’ve no idea how that got there,’ Natasha said with finality.

‘Do you think it belongs to your husband?’ Camille asked.

‘Oh no. Where would he get something like that from?’

Richard bent down to give the jewel a good inspection. It lay on its side and was cut so that it was fat at one end but sharpened to a point at the other. Richard could see tiny air bubbles trapped inside, making it clear that it really was just a trinket made of plastic.

‘So you’re saying this jewel doesn’t belong to your husband, and doesn’t belong to you, either?’

‘That’s it exactly,’ Natasha said, happy with Richard’s assessment. ‘I’ve never seen it before in my life.’

‘Then I wonder who put it there?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Don’t you? Only you seemed to recognise it.’

‘I didn’t,’ Natasha said, and Richard could see how sincere she was. ‘I was just surprised. I couldn’t work out what it was doing there.’

‘Which is very much the question, isn’t it? Can you imagine why anyone might have wanted to smash that window there, break in to your house, and then place a paste red ruby on this desk here?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve no idea what it can possibly mean.’

Natasha seemed to have got control of whatever doubts she’d previously had, and Richard could see that he wouldn’t be getting any more from her for the moment.

‘Okay, we’ll have to treat this room as a secondary crime scene, so we’ll need to have our officers process it. And we’ll need to take your fingerprints as well, Mrs Gardiner. Just so we can exclude them from whatever we find in this room, of course. And can I ask where we might be able to find sample fingerprints from your husband?’

Natasha looked into the room and indicated a spilled bottle of rum on the floor that was lying next to an old metal tumbler. ‘That’s Conrad’s bottle. And his glass. His fingerprints should be on both of them.’

Richard thanked Natasha for her time and told her they’d update her with news of her husband the moment they had any. In the meantime, she was to wait until one of his officers returned to take her fingerprints and start processing the room.

‘So what do you think of Mrs Gardiner?’ Camille asked as they walked the short distance back to the Police station.

‘I think she’s in shock.’

‘But the ruby didn’t surprise her entirely, did it?’

‘I’d agree with you there, Camille.’

‘So why did she deny all knowledge of it?’

‘Indeed,’ Richard said as he stopped at the bottom of the slope that led up to the Police station. As he did so, he saw two people emerge from the station.

‘Oh no, no, no, no, no, no,’ Richard said, and started racing up the steps two at a time.

Camille had no idea what Richard was doing, but, looking up, she saw that Dwayne was standing on the veranda and was chatting easily to a very attractive blonde woman. Camille smiled to herself. So that’s what had upset her boss.

As for Richard, he was a man on a mission as he strode onto the veranda of the Police station and found Dwayne talking to Amy, the woman who had answered the door that morning wearing only a towel.

‘Officer Myers, what the hell is going on?’

‘Chief?’ Dwayne said, startled by his boss’s sudden arrival.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘How do you mean, “here”? I work here.’

‘But I left you strict instructions to get the remains of the boat to shore. So how come you’ve been inside the station with a civilian?’

‘Whoa,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands. ‘Back up there a moment. Fidel and me have got the boat to shore. But we need to process the blood we found on it. And lift whatever prints we can find. So I came back to the station to pick up the Crime Scene Kit. And when I got here – only minutes ago, I can tell you – I found Amy waiting for me.’

‘You came back to get the Crime Scene Kit?’

‘I said.’

‘So why haven’t you got it in your hands right now?’

Dwayne was puzzled that his boss was so interested.

‘I was thirsty after all that hard work in the sun. So I got a drink of water with Amy here, and now – what you’re interrupting – is me telling her I’m busy on a case and we’ll have to meet up later on.’

Richard didn’t believe a word Dwayne was saying. He’d been sloping off work and hanging out with his new girlfriend again, Richard was sure of it.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused a problem,’ Amy said in her lilting Edinburgh accent.

‘It’s not you who’s caused a problem,’ Richard said, stiffly.

‘And anyway, it wasn’t Dwayne I came down here to see,’ she continued, and then she gave Dwayne a playful punch on the arm. Dwayne winced in melodramatic pretence that the punch had caused him mortal pain. Amy pulled a shocked face, and Richard sighed internally at the whole teenage horseplay of it all. As far as he could tell, Amy was in her early forties, and she and Dwayne were surely old enough to have got beyond what his mother called the ‘giggling and pinching’ stage of courtship.

It was only once he’d finished his thought process that Richard realised that he’d not quite registered what Amy had said.

‘How do you mean, you didn’t come to see Dwayne?’ he asked, as Camille joined them on the veranda.

‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Amy said. ‘I came to apologise to you.’

‘Apologise?’

‘Of course. For answering the door to you wearing only a towel this morning.’

Richard’s face flushed, and Amy smiled with an understanding of his embarrassment that just made his cheeks burn an even deeper shade of red.

‘Yes, well,’ he blustered. ‘It wasn’t quite what I expected, but don’t worry, I’ve seen worse. I mean, better. Or not better – that’s not right. I just mean, I’ve seen . . . if I’m honest,’ Richard said in quiet despair, ‘I don’t quite know what I mean.’

‘You just mean,’ Amy said, smoothing over Richard’s awkwardness, ‘you’re used to seeing semi-naked women.’

‘Well, normally only on the mortician’s slab, if I’m honest,’ Richard said by way of keeping things light, but it was only as he looked at Camille and Dwayne’s horrified faces that he realised how creepy he must have sounded.

‘Anyway,’ Amy said awkwardly, ‘no harm done. I just wanted to apologise. And introduce myself properly to you. I’m Amy McDiarmid.’

Amy held out her hand, and Richard was relieved finally that normality had resumed.

‘Richard Poole,’ he said. ‘How do you do.’

‘Very well, thank you,’ Amy said, as amused as Richard’s team was at his formality. ‘Although, I wanted to ask. Did you manage to see any birds this morning?’

‘How do you mean, did I see any birds?’

‘Well, it’s just, I couldn’t help noticing. When you came to the door, you had a pair of binoculars around your neck.’

‘You did?’ Dwayne said. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘That’s right,’ Amy said. ‘A nice pair of binoculars.’

‘But you’re not into birdwatching, Chief,’ Dwayne said.

‘I don’t think he was birdwatching,’ Camille said as she realised what the binoculars meant. ‘You were spying on Dwayne, weren’t you?’

‘It’s not how it looks,’ Richard said weakly.

‘You were spying on me?’ Dwayne said, amazed.

‘But Thursday mornings are for revising for your sergeant’s exam. And I’ve never seen you with any of the revision materials in the office. Or talking about how hard the work is. In fact, I’ve seen no evidence you’ve even started work on your exams. So I just wanted to check up on you. You know, that you were actually studying.’

Dwayne stared long and hard at his boss.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you’d been using your binoculars to get a glimpse of a beautiful naked woman, I reckon I could understand where you were coming from. But snooping on colleagues to check they’re looking at a load of old books . . .?’

Richard didn’t quite know what to say. Dwayne was making it sound like he was in the wrong and not Dwayne.

‘Now, I’ve got a Crime Scene Kit to get,’ Dwayne continued primly. ‘Amy, I’ll see you later.’

Dwayne gave Amy a quick kiss on the cheek, and then he turned and entered the Police station.

‘Don’t worry,’ Amy said kindly, touching Richard’s besuited elbow. ‘You know what Dwayne’s like. He’ll forget about all this in no time at all. He doesn’t bear grudges.’

Richard’s mobile phone rang in his jacket pocket.

‘If you’ll excuse me, we’re in the middle of an active case, I’ll need to answer my phone, it could be important.’

Richard stepped to one side, which gave Amy a moment alone with Camille.

‘You really answered the door to him wearing only a towel?’ Camille asked.

‘I’m afraid I did.’

‘I’d have paid anything to see his face.’

‘He went bright red.’

‘I bet he did.’

‘You know what? Your boss is just like Dwayne said he’d be. But even more so.’

Camille smiled. She’d spent a long time with Richard, and she’d long ago realised that most of his sudden squalls of anger and stick-in-the-mud curmudgeonliness came from an upbringing that had straitjacketed him from the moment he put on his first suit, shirt and tie aged four. Camille believed that inside her boss, just as surely was the case with every human, there was a free spirit bursting to get out. In the meantime, she found herself a wry spectator to his wrecking-ball social interactions. And the fact that Richard was utterly dedicated to solving crimes went a long way in her mind to making up for all his other inadequacies. Mind you, she thought to herself, he’d crossed a line when he’d started spying on Dwayne with a pair of binoculars. She knew she’d have to speak to him about that later on.

Richard returned from his phonecall, energised.

‘Okay, that was Fidel, Camille. He says he’s found something on the boat we need to see. At once. Amy, you’ll have to excuse us.’

‘Of course,’ Amy said, and called out, ‘Send my love to Dwayne,’ as she started clipping down the stairs to leave the Police station.

‘I’d rather not,’ Richard replied before turning back to Camille. ‘Right then, seeing as we’ve now got two scenes to work, I suggest we split up. You take the Crime Scene Kit back to Natasha and Conrad’s house. Dust the window frame and windowsill for fingerprints. Also, someone should see if there are any prints on that chunk of concrete that was used to smash the glass. And while you’re about it, check for footprints in the soil outside the window, and do a quick door-to-door. Did any of the neighbours see or hear anything suspicious like breaking glass before or after the explosion this morning? And above all else, make sure you bag the paste ruby. It was left on the desk for a reason, and I suggest we find out what it was.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Dwayne came out of the station holding the large metal flight case that was the station’s Crime Scene Kit.

‘Dwayne,’ Richard said, ‘Camille will need the kit for herself, she’s working a secondary crime scene. So I want you down at the harbour running a door-to-door. And also go yacht to yacht for that matter. Did anyone see Mr Gardiner go out on his boat this morning? And was anyone with him, or was he on his own? We still don’t know who was on his boat when it exploded.’

‘Were you really spying on me?’

‘We don’t have time for this now, Dwayne. I also need you to get onto the Saint-Marie dive school. I want them in their scuba kit and scouring the sea bed where the boat went down. I want a list of everything that sank from Conrad’s boat.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Camille said to Dwayne. ‘I’ll talk to him about snooping on you.’

‘Not now you won’t,’ Richard said, heading down the stairs. ‘I need to see Fidel, and you both need to get on with your jobs.’

A few minutes later, Richard was striding along the concrete quay towards where he saw the back half of Conrad’s boat resting on its side. Fidel was erecting ‘Police – Do Not Cross’ tape around it, and to the side of the quay, the Saint-Marie Coastguard were making good the winch on their boat.

‘Okay, Fidel, what have you got for me?’ Richard called out as he approached.

‘Well, sir, the explosion wasn’t an accident.’

‘You know that?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Let me show you.’

Fidel led Richard around the structure, and Richard could see that the wooden sides of the hull were jagged and torn in a way that looked as though a leviathan had risen from the deep, snapped the boat in two with its jaws – and this was the bit of the boat it had then tossed aside.

Passing the sharp edges of the hull, Richard saw that the interior of the boat had been mostly ripped out by the explosion, although there were still plenty of old pipes and rusting metal fixings sticking out at crazy angles. Mercifully, there were no smears of blood here, but Richard watched as Fidel stepped up to a dirty grey tube that ran along the inside of the boat and which was fixed with red cable ties.

‘Okay, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘I think that this section of the boat was once the engine compartment. And this tube here was the fuel inlet to the engine.’

‘So where’s the engine?’

‘I imagine it got blown from its housing and sank with everything else. But the thing is, on boats like this, the engines tend to be at the rear. In a tight and enclosed space directly under the driving position.’

‘Okay,’ Richard said, wondering where Fidel was going with this.

‘It can make them seriously dangerous if there’s any kind of cut or tear in the fuel inlet. Like we’ve got here.’

Fidel indicated a point on the pipe with his forefinger, and Richard could see that there was a deep cut that ran along it for about three inches.

‘How did that get there?’

‘I’ve looked at it, and it’s pretty neat. I think someone slit it open using a sharp knife.’

‘But why would they want to do that?’

‘Well, a tear in the fuel line like this isn’t enough to let much petrol leak, but it’s enough to let fumes from the petrol get out.’

‘Oh,’ Richard said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘Petrol fumes that then build up inside the enclosed space.’

‘Exactly, sir. And then, the tiniest spark and the whole thing goes up.’

‘But how did you find that rip?’ Richard asked, looking at all the dozens of feet of pipes that ran around the inside of the boat’s hull.

‘Well, sir, I was carrying out a visual inspection of the wreck when I found this.’

Fidel walked around the inside of the boat and pulled down a mess of what looked like electric cables that were tied together with parcel tape. But as Richard looked more closely, he saw that there was something else that the parcel tape was holding in place.

It was a mobile phone.

What was a mobile phone doing taped to the inside of an engine compartment?

As Richard looked again, he could see that it was one of the old-fashioned plastic phones that had no touchscreen, it just had buttons and the smallest of screens for the minimum of text.

But there were also two thin electric cables emerging from the housing of the phone – and the plastic at the end of each cable was stripped back to reveal copper wires. Richard took a step back, the sheer enormity of what Fidel had uncovered hitting him.

‘Good grief,’ he said.

Someone had sliced into the fuel pipes of the boat so that the enclosed engine compartment would fill with petrol fumes. But this person had also taped a doctored phone inside the same engine compartment. When the boat was heading out to sea, the compartment filled with petrol vapour, and this person had then rung the number of the mobile phone. The incoming call had turned on the circuit that was supposed to drive the motor that made the phone vibrate, but it had been re-routed to a couple of cables that led outside the casing. And once the current was flowing in these two little cables, the electricity had arced and caused the tiniest of sparks.