The Killing Of Polly Carter

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?’

‘Yes. What’s so strange about that?’

Camille clapped her hands together in delight. ‘How long is she over for?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘And she’s here now?’

‘She should be.’

‘But you’ve got to tell us, what’s she like?’

Richard frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know, your mother! I mean, is she like you at all, sir?’

‘Like me?’ Richard was appalled by the question. ‘Of course not.’

‘Then what’s she like?’

Richard didn’t even know where to begin. After a moment of further reflection, he said, ‘Well, for starters, she’s very neat and precise.’

‘Which isn’t like you at all, sir,’ Dwayne said.

‘And on top of that, she’s a terrible worry-wort.’

Dwayne and Camille frowned.

‘A what?’ Camille asked.

‘You know, she worries about everything.’

‘Which is also unlike you, is it, Chief?’ Dwayne eventually asked as diplomatically as he could.

‘And she’s a fusspot.’

‘She’s a worry-wort and a fusspot?’ Camille asked, unable to keep the laugh out of her voice.

‘Yes. That’s what I said.’

As for Dwayne, he also felt as though he needed further clarification from his boss. ‘Again, sir … so you’re saying these are traits that are unlike you?’

‘Of course they’re unlike me!’ Richard exploded. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I believe everything has a place, and there’s a place for everything—and I definitely believe that there are certain standards you have to keep up—but you have to believe me, I’m nothing compared to my mother.’

‘Wow,’ Dwayne said, summing up both his and Camille’s feelings on the subject.

‘So when do we get to meet her?’ Camille asked.

‘Ah, well that’s the thing,’ Richard said, finally glad to be getting back control of the conversation. ‘While I’m picking her up, I want you, Camille, to get all this evidence logged and into bags. And, Dwayne, I want you to search the house properly from top to bottom. Keep looking for a yellow raincoat, but I also want you to try and find out what this key opens.’ As Richard said this, he went over to the filing cabinet and pulled out the old mortice key. ‘Because it may be connected. But someone killed Polly Carter. I suggest we find out who it was, and why Polly had to die.’

Before either of his subordinates could stop him, Richard made his excuses and drove off in the police jeep, bound for Saint-Marie airport.

Once there—and while he waited for his mother to clear Customs—Richard stood beside a palm tree a little way off from the white-washed building that acted as both the island’s Arrivals and Departures lounge. The building was only small because Saint-Marie didn’t have a runway long enough for international flights, so tourists first had to fly to the neighbouring island of Guadeloupe and then change onto a little propeller plane that the locals called ‘the grasshopper’. Richard had only taken this plane a handful of times, but it was aptly named. By the time it had ascended vertiginously to its cruising height, it immediately fell out of the sky to land on Saint-Marie.

Richard straightened his tie as he waited, and then realised it had come a little loose. But it would be okay, he was sure.

In a sudden loss of sartorial confidence, Richard ducked behind the palm tree, undid the knot of his tie, yanked the whole thing from his neck, flicked the collars up on his sweat-sodden shirt, and made himself tie a better knot at speed. He then flipped the collar of his shirt back down, stepped back out into the sunshine and exhaled in relief. He’d got away with it. His mother still hadn’t emerged.

Richard felt a trickle of hot sweat roll from his cheek, down his neck and into his shirt collar, and suddenly every inch of his skin under his suit seemed to prickle from the blistering heat.

And then there she was.

A slender woman in her late sixties, wearing a pink floral dress and an immaculate straw hat with a hatband in the same pink floral fabric as her dress, Jennifer Poole stepped out into the sunshine, a black suitcase-on-wheels at her side.

Richard took half a step forward and raised his hand in a nearly-but-not-quite wave.

‘Hello, Mother,’ he said.

‘Oh, Richard, what a terrifying journey!’ Jennifer said, as she wheeled her suitcase over to her son. ‘I mean, they call it economy, and they really mean it, don’t they? Before we’d even left London, I was trying to get the dust out of my seat, and do you know what? The woman sitting next to me told me I should just put up with it. Can you imagine? And when I started using my wipes on the fold-down tray in front of me—and on her fold-down tray—she called a flight attendant over and point blank complained. Which made for a frosty silence between her and me for the next eight hours, I can tell you. But by the time we landed at Guadeloupe, she was sneezing, so for all she gave me funny looks whenever I used the antibacterial gel on my hands, I’m not the one who’s going to come down with Legionnaires’ Disease.’

Even Richard was pretty sure that no one caught Legionnaires’ Disease from aeroplane air conditioning systems. But before he could tell his mother this, she was off again.

‘And when we landed in Guadeloupe, I couldn’t believe how hot it was. I mean, I expected the tropics to be hot, but I wasn’t expecting heat like this, and I remember the heatwave of 1976. But I’d decided I’d just have to cope with it when they took us to the plane they told us we were transferring to Saint-Marie on. Well! I could see rust around the rivets on the wings. And you know how your great uncle was in the Fleet Air Arm, and he always said you should never get in a machine that didn’t look as though it was looked after with pride?’

Richard noted the pause, and gave the correct response.

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘Well, I very nearly didn’t get on it, and then—when I did—I discovered that I was sitting next to a man who had a chicken on his lap in a crate. I mean, it was a very fine-looking chicken, but you don’t expect to see a chicken on a commercial flight, do you?’

Again, Richard gave the correct response. ‘No, Mother.’

‘But I’m here now, I suppose, and it really is wonderful to see you.’

Jennifer stopped talking long enough to look at her son.

‘And I must say, you look very smart.’

Richard couldn’t help but feel a little burst of pride at this compliment.

‘So where’s Dad?’ he asked, and recognised the maternal frown at once.

‘Do I need to go everywhere with him? I am my own person, you know,’ she said.

‘No, of course you are,’ Richard quickly agreed. ‘It’s just, I’ve only really got time to drop you off at your hotel, I’m afraid. There’s been a murder.’

Jennifer looked at her son and sighed.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been putting up with your father’s murders my whole life, I’m sure I can put up with yours.’

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.’

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