The Killing Of Polly Carter

‘She could also be capable of great kindness,’ he said, wanting to defend his former boss. ‘Like the way she always brought gifts back for us whenever she went abroad. Or still paid you your salary even when you broke your foot the year before last. That was kind of her.’

‘It was the least she could do,’ Juliette said, more for her husband’s benefit than for the police. ‘And all those drugs she took didn’t help with her moods, I can tell you that much.’

‘So you knew about her drugs?’

‘It was impossible not to.’

‘But she’d stopped,’ Alain said, still trying hard to remain loyal. ‘All that was in the past.’

‘And how would you know?’ Camille asked politely.

Alain frowned. ‘Because she never hid her drugs from us. You’d be cleaning the pool, or tidying away after breakfast and she’d just get out her … you know, all that terrible paraphernalia in front of you. The foil, the filthy spoon, the whole thing, it was disgusting.’

‘She’d inject herself in front of you?’

‘She never injected. As far as I know. She used to smoke her heroin. She called it “chasing the dragon”. But that’s the thing. I’d not seen her do any drugs since she got back from rehab a few months ago.’

‘Yes, we understand she was in rehab in the States. Was that right?’

‘That’s right,’ Alain agreed. ‘And when she got back, I’m pretty sure she’d kicked the habit.’

Juliette snorted, and Richard looked at her.

‘A leopard doesn’t change its spots,’ she said. ‘And if we didn’t see Polly taking her heroin, that just means she’d found somewhere secret to do it, if you ask me.’

Richard looked at Juliette and couldn’t work out if he was grateful for her lack of sympathy for the deceased, or if he should consider it deeply suspicious.

‘Then can you help with something else?’ Richard asked. ‘Only, it’s possible that there was someone already on the cliff steps before Polly died. Someone who was wearing a yellow raincoat.’

‘There was?’ Juliette asked, sharply.

‘Apparently so,’ Richard said, trying to keep the interest out of his voice. It was clear that what he’d said had chimed with Juliette.

‘What sort of yellow coat?’ Juliette asked.

‘A bright yellow raincoat.’

‘With a hood?’

‘Do you know someone who owns a coat like that?’

‘I don’t. But a few days ago, I saw someone down at the bottom of the garden—you know, over by the cliff’s edge—wearing a shiny yellow raincoat with a hood, and I couldn’t work out who it was. I just presumed it was someone from the house.’

‘Did you see if this person was a man or a woman?’ Richard asked.

‘I don’t know. I was too far away.’

‘Then what about the person’s build? Or hair, even? Think. It could be important. What can you describe of this person?’

Juliette thought for a long time before answering.

‘I’m sorry. Whoever it was, I couldn’t see, but I remembered it because they had their hood up.’

‘This person had the hood up on their raincoat so you couldn’t see their face?’

‘That’s right.’

Richard frowned. This was the second time someone in the house had seen a mystery person wearing a yellow raincoat over by the top of the cliff. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?

‘But if you had to guess, who in the house could it have been?’ Richard asked.

‘I’m sorry. It could have been anyone.’

‘Maybe the person wasn’t from the house,’ Alain offered.

‘Is that possible?’

‘It might be. There’s an old smugglers’ path that goes around the headland up here. People sometimes use it as a shortcut to get around the coast even though they’re not supposed to.’

‘There’s a smugglers’ path up here?’ Richard asked, surprised.

‘That’s right,’ Juliette said, taking control of the conversation back from her husband. ‘This used to be a smuggler’s house. Because of its access to the hidden bay. Back in the day, illegal shipments would come in by boat and get unloaded on the beach at the bottom of the cliffs where the British customs officials couldn’t see. You know?’

‘So the general public have access to Polly’s garden?’

‘They aren’t supposed to, but there’s plenty of people who know about the paths. There are old smugglers’ paths all over the island.’

Richard was disappointed. As long as the mythical yellow-coat wearer was one of the people from the house, then proving that person’s identity might have been an achievable aim. But if it could have been anyone on the island who went down the steps wearing a yellow coat just before Polly died …?

‘I see. Then would you mind if we search your house for a yellow coat?’ Richard said and he noticed Juliette’s eyes narrow at once.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ she said, and both Richard and Camille could see the intelligence in her eyes as she asked the question.

‘Because it’s possible that Polly interacted with this person in the yellow coat just before she fell to her death. And we’re trying to find the coat.’

‘What?’ Juliette said. ‘Are you saying the guy in the yellow coat pushed Polly to her death?’

‘We’re very specifically not saying that,’ Richard clarified. ‘However, we’re not ruling anything out for the moment, either.’

Juliette looked at the police and Richard wondered if there was a hint of triumph in her voice as she said, ‘Search wherever you like.’

As the cottage was small, it didn’t take Richard and Camille long to discover that there wasn’t any kind of yellow raincoat anywhere—and nothing much else of interest, either. Once Richard and Camille had thanked the Moreaus for their time, they went back outside.

‘So what did you think?’ Richard asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Camille said. ‘He seemed shocked. Decent. But there was something about her, wasn’t there?’

‘She was happy enough to stick the knife into the deceased,’ Richard agreed.

Before Richard could say anything more, the alarm went off on his mobile phone—which he was quick to pull out of his pocket and silence.

‘What’s that?’ Camille asked.

Richard knew that it was a reminder he’d set earlier to tell him his mother would be touching down on Saint-Marie in an hour’s time.

‘Oh, nothing,’ he lied.

‘No, I don’t buy it,’ Camille said. ‘You’ve been checking your watch all day, and I’ve never known you set an alarm before. Something’s up.’

Richard looked at his subordinate and knew that he had no quick answer, so he decided that his best course of action would be to pretend that she hadn’t spoken at all. He started walking away from her.

‘Hey!’ Camille called out after her boss, before setting off to catch up with him.

‘I want to see this old smugglers’ path,’ Richard said, as though he weren’t sidestepping Camille’s question.

‘Okay, if you want to be like that,’ Camille said, ‘but I’ll find out what’s going on. You know I will.’

‘Nothing’s going on,’ Richard lied again. ‘But where’s this path?’

‘Don’t worry, it’ll be over by the cliff’s edge, I reckon. If it’s an old smugglers’ path.’

Once they’d passed the border of shrubs and plants that separated the main garden from the cliff top, Camille looked at where the garden stopped and the jungle began.

‘Yes, you can see it there,’ she said, pointing at an old dirt path that was set ten or so feet back from the cliff’s edge—and which started at the edge of the lawn and disappeared into the thick jungle that swept down the headland.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Richard could see the old path as well.

‘And where do you think the path leads?’ he asked

‘All the old coastal paths around here lead back to Honoré.’

As Camille was saying this, Fidel appeared over by the cliff’s steps.

‘Sir, sir, I think I’ve found it!’

Richard and Camille went over to Fidel, and, as the three police officers descended the steps that were carved into the cliff face, Fidel explained how the paramedics had removed the body, and since then he had been trying to identify the place on the stairs from where Polly had jumped.

‘And I think I’ve found it, sir.’

As Fidel said this, he led around the first bend in the stairs, and, just a few steps further on, he pointed at the edge of the step. Richard could see there was a gap in the stubby thorn bushes that ran along the edge of the steps, and the escarpment of red dirt had given away a bit. Edging as close to the vertiginous drop as he dared, Richard looked over and could see that the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the beach below.

Richard looked about himself and saw that this spot on the stairs was, as Claire had said had been the case, just beyond the first turn in the steps as they led down the cliff face. As such, this was pretty much the first place on the whole staircase where a person would have been invisible to anyone standing at the top of the stairs. Or sitting in a wheelchair.

This troubled Richard. After all, why didn’t Polly just jump to her death from the top of the cliff? Or from the first flight of steps? Why did she wait until she’d gone around the first bend and started down the second flight of steps before she jumped?

Putting the thought to one side, Richard looked again at how the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the sand far below, and decided that Fidel was almost certainly right. This was where Polly had fallen to her death. In which case, what had Polly cut her arm on? Richard couldn’t immediately see any blood on the steps or anything obviously woody that might have imparted the green tinge they found on her hands and around the cut in her arm.

Fidel already had the crime scene kit to hand, so Richard got out a spray bottle of Luminol and the portable ultraviolet lamp. If Polly had already been bleeding when she went over the edge—as seemed likely—then there should be evidence of blood spatter on the red earth where she’d gone over.

Richard sprayed a fine mist of liquid Luminol over the dirt where he thought Polly’s blood might have dropped. He then shone the ultraviolet light over the same ground immediately afterwards. Blotches of blood immediately started to fluoresce a purplish silver under the UV light.

‘Okay, so there are drops of blood here,’ Richard said. ‘Good work, Fidel. This is now a secondary crime scene. Please secure and process it. In particular, I want you to check if there’s any trail of blood spots that leads to here, or whether the blood is in fact confined to this one site.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Richard creaked back to a standing position, pulled his hankie from his jacket pocket and tried to wipe the sweat from his face and back of his neck.

Camille could see that her boss was troubled.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Well, don’t those spots of blood strike you as odd?’

Camille had played this game often enough to know that it was quicker if she just pleaded ignorance. ‘No, sir. Not odd in any way. So why don’t you tell me why they’re odd.’

‘Because,’ Richard said, ‘if this blood came from Polly’s wound in her arm—which seems to be a fair working assumption—then where’s the object that caused the cut?’

Camille thought for a moment. ‘Maybe she cut herself elsewhere and that’s where the object still is.’

‘But you’ve seen the blood spatter. It looks as though it’s localised to this one step here.’ Richard looked about himself, nonplussed. ‘Okay, let’s work this through. I think the moss on her arm means that she was cut by a branch or bit of wood.’

‘That seems reasonable.’

‘And it will have to have been of decent size to cause such a deep wound.’

‘That also seems reasonable.’

‘So where is it?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.’

Richard and Camille started looking for any kind of loose piece of wood in the scrubby bushes that ran up and down the seaward side of the stone staircase. For Richard, this task required nerves of steel, if only because it involved going right up to the edge of the staircase—a vertical drop to almost certain death only inches beyond—and then reaching in to the bush to see if there was any loose branch hidden inside. And it really didn’t help that the bushes were all thorn bushes.

Richard called out a sudden ‘Ow!’ for the hundredth time as he removed his right hand from one of the thorn bushes, and Camille found herself having to suppress a smile. Watching her boss in his woollen suit pull thorns from his hand while halfway up a cliff face in the searing Caribbean heat, she couldn’t help but conclude that he was one of the most extraordinary men she’d ever met. And even though she mostly found him stubborn, arrogant and lacking in any kind of human warmth, there was no denying that, as a policeman, he got results. And for that, Camille could almost forgive him all his other personal failings. Almost forgive him.

‘Aha!’ Richard called out from further down the steps.

‘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

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.’

‘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.