Death Knocks Twice

‘As long as this remains an unexplained phenomenon, then I want you to get some plaster of Paris from the Crime Scene Kit, and make casts of these tyre prints. In particular, I’d like you to make sure you get a decent cast of this repeating mark on the front wheel.’ Here, Richard indicated the repeating ‘cut’ mark in the middle tyre’s print.

‘Yes, sir,’ Fidel said, thrilled that his lead was important enough to be taken seriously.

‘And while you’re doing that, Camille and I need to look at the murder scene again, because I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.’

‘We do, sir?’ Camille asked.

‘I think we do.’

Back at the murder scene, Richard and Camille found Dwayne photographing the body.

‘Have you been able to identify the victim yet?’ Richard asked.

‘Not yet, Chief. Although I think he could be a Brit.’

‘You do?’

‘He’s got some loose change in his pockets, and plenty of it is UK currency.’

‘He’s got British coins in his pockets?’

‘He has, sir.’

Dwayne handed over a small see-through evidence bag to his boss that was full of coins.

‘But I also found a receipt in his back pocket you might want to look at.’

Dwayne handed over an evidence bag that contained a cheap till receipt with blue ink so faded that it was hard to read.

‘You need to turn it over,’ Dwayne suggested.

Richard turned the evidence bag over and could see that on the other side of the receipt, someone had scribbled ‘11am’ in biro.

‘It says ‘11am’,’ Richard said. ‘He was killed just after 11am.’

‘Suggesting to me, Chief, that our victim was perhaps here for a pre-arranged meeting.’

‘Now that’s interesting,’ Richard said, and handed the evidence bag to Camille for her to inspect. ‘So this murder was possibly premeditated. Have we really got nothing beyond a few British coins to help us work out who this man was?’

‘I’m sorry, Chief. Although the victim’s got a pretty distinctive scar on the forefinger of his left hand.’

Dwayne crouched down and turned the victim’s left hand over, indicating an old scar that ran along the victim’s forefinger. It was white, ridged, and a good two inches long.

‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘So, apart from a scar on his left hand, a few British coins, and a cryptic till receipt with “11am” written on it, we don’t know who the victim is?’

‘That’s about it, sir,’ Dwayne agreed.

‘So what’s the problem?’ Camille asked, reminding Richard of what he’d said only a few minutes earlier.

‘It’s this window,’ Richard said as he led Dwayne and Camille over to the little metal-framed window on the far wall of the room. ‘Or to be more precise, this window, the vent in the ceiling, and that door,’ he said, pointing at the ceiling and broken-in door in turn as he spoke.

‘Why’s that?’ Dwayne asked.

‘Tell me what you see,’ Richard said as he indicated the window.

‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, buying himself time, ‘unless this is a trick question, it’s a window.’

‘You’re right, Dwayne. It’s a window. Camille?’

Camille’s instincts were already telling her where Richard was going with this. So she got out a pair of evidence gloves, snapped them on, and started checking out the window frame. She could see that it was fixed solidly to the stone casement, and the glass was held in place with old putty that had crumbled in places but had clearly not been tampered with in any way. But she knew the real test would be the latch that kept the window locked shut, and she gently touched it with her fingers. It didn’t move. In fact, she could see that the window’s latch was jammed tightly into the window frame.

What was more, Camille could see that the metal lever that allowed the window to open and close had an old butterfly screw on it that was tightly screwed down as well. Giving the butterfly screw a hard twist to the left, she unscrewed it enough that she could finally open the window. She then stuck her head outside. There was an undisturbed flower bed directly underneath the window with only a few weeds in, and the rest of the area behind the shower room was concreted over.

She then closed the window again, reset the catch in the window frame and re-locked the butterfly screw on the lever.

‘Okay,’ she pronounced, ‘so the window was locked. And it can only be locked from the inside.’

‘Precisely,’ Richard said, pleased that Camille had also worked it out.

Camille crossed to the centre of the room and looked up at the ceiling high above them.

‘And there’s no way in or out of this room through the roof. Not even with that vent built into the top.’

‘Agreed,’ Richard said. ‘It’s far too small.’

Camille led over to the main door.

‘And this door is seriously old, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You couldn’t even begin to tamper with the hinges, or get around it or under it in any way.’

‘Quite so,’ Richard said.

Camille inspected the thick iron bolt that ran across the back of the door. It was about three feet long, and was fixed very firmly inside a solid housing made of iron. And it was obvious that neither the bolt nor housing had been tampered with any more than the hinges of the door had been.

So Camille turned her attention to the door frame. It was just as solid as the door, and the lock worked by sliding the iron bolt across so it slotted into a deep hole that had been drilled directly into the door frame. She could see that the iron bolt had ripped through the wooden frame when Richard had smashed the door open with his sledgehammer.

‘As for the iron bolt,’ Camille said, ‘it was very clearly slid across when you bashed the door open. You can see where the bolt has torn through the wood of the door frame. And that’s why we’ve got a problem, isn’t it?’

‘Got it in one, Camille,’ Richard said returning to the centre room. ‘Because this room is entirely made of stone, and there are only three ways a human could have got out of it after the murder – those being through the window on the far side, out through the roof, or through this door. The ceiling is impossible, and both the door and the window were locked from the inside.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally dawning on him. ‘That’s the problem!’

‘It is, Dwayne,’ Richard agreed.

The three Police officers looked at each other.

‘That’s quite a problem,’ Dwayne said on all of their behalves.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Richard agreed. ‘Because, seeing as we found no-one else in here when we broke in, just how did our killer commit murder and then escape from a locked room?’

CHAPTER THREE

When Richard and his team returned to the Police station, he set them to work. Dwayne was tasked with processing the physical evidence. In particular, Richard wanted him to lift whatever fingerprints he could identify on the gun that had very possibly been used to kill the victim – and the two shell casings they’d found near the victim. As for Fidel, he’d stayed at the plantation to create plaster casts of the tyre prints he’d found behind the farm buildings, so he returned to the Police station after everyone else. Once back, he laid out the three chunky blocks of white plaster of Paris on his desk. Each one was about a foot long – and six inches deep, and six inches wide – and the surface of each of the casts was covered in grit and dirt. Fidel set to cleaning them up with a make-up brush. Once that was done, Richard tasked him with trying to use the tyre casts to identify the make and model of the vehicle from a Caribbean-wide database of tyre prints.

As for Richard, seeing as the victim had been found with British currency in his pocket – and Lucy had said that the man had been lurking up at the plantation for the last few weeks – he decided to pull the border records for all of the Brits who’d arrived at the Saint-Marie airport in the last eight weeks. But when he spoke to the Head of Security at the airport, he discovered that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The man informed Richard that maybe as many as five thousand British tourists had arrived on the island in the previous eight weeks, and while the airport had CCTV footage of everyone as they made their way through passport control, the only way of doing any kind of visual search for the victim would be to sit down and watch every minute of airport CCTV footage from the previous eight weeks.

This was clearly impractical, so Richard asked him to send through the names of every British traveller above the age of fifty who’d arrived on the island in that time, and who’d been travelling on his own. This was because Richard had already guessed – based on the evidence of the tawdry hideout they’d found in the jungle – that their victim had perhaps been operating on his own. In fact, as Richard explained the parameters for the search he wanted carried out, he realised that there would possibly be a few dozen Brits a day who met the criteria. After all, how many fifty-plus British men travelled to a Caribbean holiday destination on their own? And then, once the Head of Security had sent the details over, Richard knew he could either cross-reference the names with whatever hotels were listed on their immigration forms, or – given that he’d now know what flights they’d arrived on – he could just pull the airport CCTV footage for each person’s arrival, and see if he could identify the victim visually. And here, Richard knew that their victim’s long grey hair and yellow/white beard should make him easy to spot.

In fact, Richard realised, if their victim was indeed from the UK and had arrived at any time in the last eight weeks, it might be possible to work out his identity in the next few hours.

‘You’re right,’ the Head of Security said at the other end of the phone. ‘I’d even go so far as to say that you’re onto something there.’

‘Thank you,’ Richard said.

‘Although, it’ll take longer than a few hours to identify your British traveller.’

‘Why? The list won’t be very long, will it?’

‘Oh it’ll barely be a few hundred names. It’s just going to take a few days to get the list to you, that’s all.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘If not longer than a few days. Tell you what,’ the man paused as though he were about to do Richard a massive favour. ‘I reckon I can get the list of solo Brits to you by the beginning of next week.’

‘What?’

‘Or soon after.’

‘But it’s only Thursday now. Surely you’ve already got this information on your system?’

‘Of course. We take everyone’s details who arrives on the island. We’re a professional outfit.’

‘Then it should take all of about thirty seconds to create a search on your system for solo British travellers from the last eight weeks aged fifty years and over, and then you can email me the results. I could start working on this in the next few minutes!’

There was a pause at the other end of the line.

And then the man coughed to clear his throat.

‘What’s that?’ Richard asked.

‘Nothing. It’s just – well, let me put it like this. I agree, your plan makes perfect sense. It’s just we had a bit of an IT problem at the end of last week.’

‘You did?’

‘So I don’t think it will be that easy. But we’ll definitely be able to get you the results you want at some point next week. Or the week after.’

‘What sort of an IT problem?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You said you had “a bit of an IT problem”. So I just wanted to know. What sort of IT problem did you have?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to me,’ Richard said, feeling his blood pressure rising. ‘Seeing as I’m trying to run a murder case here.’

‘Yes. Well, when you put it like that, that makes a lot of sense.’

‘So what was it?’

There was another pause at the other end of the line – and then the man spoke really very quietly indeed.

‘An iguana got into a cable duct.’

‘What’s that?’

‘An iguana got into our cable ducts and ate through our network cables.’

‘You know, it’s funny,’ Richard said. ‘But I could have sworn that you just told me that an iguana had eaten through your network cables.’

‘That’s because I did.’

‘But how can that have even been possible?’ Richard all but shouted into the mouthpiece of his phone. ‘I mean, don’t you have security precautions in place to stop this sort of thing?’

‘Don’t use that tone with me, Inspector.’

‘Then what tone should I be using? Would you rather I sent you a big bunch of flowers with a card wishing you “condolences at this difficult time”?’

The Head of Security didn’t dignify Richard’s comment with a response, and Richard found himself exhaling heavily. He’d long ago come to understand – if not accept – that solving cases on a tiny tropical island was always going to be fraught with difficulties. For example, Saint-Marie was too small to have a local Coroner’s office where autopsies could be carried out. And there were no Ballistics or Forensics labs either. If Richard ever needed evidence processed by any kind of forensics lab, he generally had to send it to the far larger nearby island of Guadeloupe, and they rarely prioritised Saint-Marie’s needs. It’s why Richard insisted on as much of the crime scene evidence being dealt with in the office by hand. At least that way, he could have some control over how quickly it was all processed.

But for every ‘typical’ problem that Richard had to endure in his Police work, he was always staggered by just how many ‘atypical’ problems he also had to face. Like discovering that he was being thwarted in delivering justice for a murder victim because of an omnivorous iguana.

‘Look,’ Richard said, ‘far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but if you’ve got an iguana in your cable ducts, then surely the first step is to remove it? By fair means or foul,’ he added darkly.

‘Oh don’t worry,’ the man said brightly, ‘we got the iguana out after only a couple of days. It’s just that while it was in there, it went pretty much where it liked, and that’s when it ate through the network cables. We’re still trying to work out exactly which ones. And once we do, we’ll have our computers back up and running in no time.’

‘So are you even recording who arrives and leaves the island at the moment?’

‘Of course. But we’ve been forced back into utilising the old system of writing every arrival’s name down in a ledger by hand, and I don’t need to tell you that this has stretched our border control resources almost to breaking point.’ Richard knew that when the man said ‘border control resources’ he was referring to a woman called Janice. ‘But I might be able to get some time this weekend to work through the books and pull the names of solo British travellers for you.’

Richard saw his opening at last. ‘Then how about I come up to the airport right now and go through the lists myself?’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

‘Why not?’

‘Janice is using the book.’

Richard took a deep breath to steady himself. Then, as time passed, he realised it hadn’t made him feel any better. In fact, it was making him feel very much worse – and significantly hot around the collar – and then he realised that he hadn’t breathed out yet, so he quickly expelled the air from his lungs to stop himself from fainting.

‘Are you alright?’ the Head of Security asked.

‘Of course I’m fine,’ Richard said, still feeling a touch light-headed. ‘But you’re saying there’s no way I can get the names I need any quicker?’

‘Got it in one,’ the Head of Security said, glad that Richard was finally ‘on side’. ‘And I promise you, I’ll get you the names at the beginning of next week. Or maybe a few days later – depending on what I’m up to this weekend.’

‘Well, let’s hope you’re not too busy’, Richard said before thanking the man for his time and slamming the phone onto its cradle.

Only then did Richard look up and see that his entire team looking at him.

‘What’s wrong with you lot?’ he said tetchily.

‘Your face went very red, sir,’ Fidel said.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to take your suit jacket off?’ Dwayne asked.

‘Camille!’ Richard barked, not wanting to get sidetracked again by his team’s desire to get him into cooler clothes. ‘How are you getting on with identifying our victim?’

‘Well, sir,’ Camille said, ‘no-one’s contacted us or any of the other government agencies since this morning to report anyone missing.’

‘What about hospitals?’

‘None of them has lost any of their patients.’

‘Then what about hotels? He must have been staying somewhere at nights.’

‘Agreed, sir. But there are no reports of missing guests from hotels, either.’

‘So who the hell is he?’ Richard asked, his anger driving him up out of his seat. ‘I mean, come on, everyone! Theories?’

‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘he didn’t look too wealthy, did he?’

‘I’d agree with that.’

‘And the empty bottle of vodka we found in the clearing was pretty cheap.’

‘Yes. That’s true.’

‘And, without wishing to be indelicate, sir, he didn’t seem in the best condition, did he? Although, I suppose he’d been spending most of his time in a jungle for the last few weeks.’

‘Assuming Lucy Beaumont was telling us the truth,’ Camille said. ‘After all, she’s the only member of the family who ever saw the man.’

‘Yes,’ Richard agreed. ‘Assuming she was telling the truth. All of which rather begs the question: what exactly was our victim attempting to achieve up at the Plantation? Was it Lucy he was spying on, or was he up to something else, and it’s just one of those things that only Lucy saw him? Actually,’ Richard said, a new thought occurring to him. ‘While we’re on the subject of Lucy, can you fill me in a bit on the family? What do we know about them?’

There was an awkward pause while Camille, Fidel and Dwayne all looked at each other, not sure what to say.

‘Oh? Is there a problem?’

‘Well, Chief, they’re not a very well-liked family on the island,’ Dwayne said.

‘And why’s that?’

‘None of the old families who used slaves are much liked, sir.’

This comment caught Richard by surprise. He wasn’t so naive as to be unaware of both Britain and France’s appalling history of using African slaves to work on their plantations in the Caribbean. However, since Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833 – over 180 years ago – he’d not noticed much in the way of current tensions around the subject.

In fact, as a white Brit who was a guest on Saint-Marie, one of the first things Richard had done when he’d arrived was go to the library in Honoré and ask to borrow a book that would teach him the history of the island, with particular reference to how Saint-Marie had been treated by the British government. It seemed the least he could do as a Brit visiting a former colony. Richard was unsurprised – but nonetheless still chastened – to read about how deprivations, abuse and what could only be called outright kidnap and murder had been the basis of so many families’ wealth back in the UK during this period of over one hundred years.

As he looked at his team now and saw how grave and focused they were, he realised how wrong he’d been. The tensions were still there. It’s just that they were beneath the surface.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, ‘there are so few families left who go back to the bad old days. But those few who are still here, and are still running the same businesses now as they were then, well, they’ve got blood on their hands.’

‘Yes, I can see that,’ Richard said.

Dwayne briefly smiled at his boss’s words. For all of Richard’s many faults – and there was no doubting that he had many faults – his team knew that he treated everyone equally, irrespective of the colour of their skin. Admittedly, this was mainly because Richard presumed that everyone was going to be a bitter disappointment to him before he’d even met them, but his team had always acknowledged that he was at least colour-blind in his misanthropy.

‘So you’re saying that the Beaumonts still have enemies on the island?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Dwayne said. ‘But although there’s plenty of islanders who work on their plantation when it comes to harvest time, there’s very few who are happy working there full time.’

‘Yes. We saw that today, didn’t we? There was no-one else up at the plantation apart from the family.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what do we know about the members of the family?’

Here, Camille got up some handwritten notes from the mess of her desk.

‘Okay, so Hugh Beaumont is fifty years old, is solely in charge of the plantation, and from the few enquiries I’ve made, he’s considered a pretty fair boss. Unlike his father William, who he took over from when he died back in 2001.’

‘You can say that again,’ Dwayne said. ‘William was a tyrant.’

‘He was?’

‘Sure was, Chief. The man was bad news. After Mount Esmée erupted back in 1979 and the coffee fields were wiped out, he drove his workforce to breaking point getting them to clear away the ash, rework the soil and replant the coffee plants. And all along he promised them a serious bonus if they got the fields ready again by the next growing season. When they’d completed the task – and in time – he gave them their bonus, which turned out to be a 10-kilogram bag of coffee each. It was a scandal at the time.’

‘Dwayne’s right,’ Fidel said. ‘My mum talks about that winter after the eruption. It was really tough on the whole island. Everyone had to pull together.’

‘And William Beaumont took advantage of all of the island’s goodwill,’ Dwayne said. ‘I remember there was an accident one day. One of the pile-drivers that was being used to put in wooden posts for the coffee plants crushed one of the workers, killing him. William didn’t even allow anyone from the plantation time off to attend the funeral. It was all about getting the place back up and running again.’

‘So William was a nasty piece of work,’ Richard said. ‘But you’re saying he died in 2001, and his son Hugh is less of a tyrant?’

‘Got it in one,’ Dwayne agreed. ‘As far as I know, Hugh runs the place pretty fairly. I’ve got a few mates who do seasonal work for him. He pays on time. And as long as you work hard, he doesn’t mind too much if you arrive a little bit late or leave a bit early.’

‘So he’s one of the more acceptable Beaumonts? Could we say that about him?’

‘More acceptable,’ Dwayne agreed, making it clear from the way he leaned on the word ‘more’ that it was all relative.

‘Then what about Sylvie Beaumont, his wife?’

‘Well, she’s interesting,’ Camille said, getting up a Saint-Marie newspaper article from 1991 on her computer monitor. ‘She’s the same age as Hugh – fifty years old – and her engagement to him made the Saint-Marie Times twenty-five years ago. In this article here it says she was originally from Maldon in Essex, and that she met Hugh in a bar on Saint-Marie when she was over here working as a holiday rep for Club Caribbean.’

The Police knew Club Caribbean well. It was full of twenty- to thirty-year olds who came to the island to have ‘fun’ which, Richard had too often had cause to notice, seemed to involve ingesting vast amounts of liquid before ejecting an equivalent amount again only a few hours later – which hardly seemed ‘fun’ to him.

‘Ha!’ Richard said out loud. ‘I knew there was something about her accent that didn’t ring true.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, let me put it this way, I don’t think the matriarch of Beaumont Manor who we met this morning spoke in quite the same plummy accent when she was a holiday rep from Maldon in Essex.’

‘And you should know,’ Camille added, ‘that she seems to be in the newspapers every month. She’s chair of this charity, sits on the board of that marine preserve, you know? She’s a do-gooder.’

‘A do-gooder who’s vain enough to want everyone to see just how much do-gooding she’s up to. Very interesting. Good work, Camille. Then what of their children? In particular, can you explain why everyone speaks with a British accent except for Tom?’