Читать книгу Murder in the Caribbean - Robert Thorogood, Роберт Торогуд - Страница 10

CHAPTER ONE

Ordinary Police Officer Dwayne Myers had lived in the same house his whole adult life. It was a concrete-poured bungalow that was set in lush jungle that rose behind and above the sleepy town of Honoré on the western coast of the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie.

Where the money had come from to buy such a desirable plot of land was, fortunately for Dwayne, never quite established by the Saint-Marie Tax Office. He was also lucky that he’d not had a visit from the island’s Planning Officer since then because, while he’d started building a two-storey house, his money had run out half way through. This meant that when he took occupancy of his new home, his builders had only completed the ground floor, although they’d left the necessary steel rods poking up out of the ‘roof’ should Dwayne ever wish to finish building the floor above.

He never had.

In fact, as the years passed, Dwayne had come to like the way the steel rods jutted out of his bungalow. You always knew which house was his, he’d say proudly to anyone who asked.

But then, the unfinished house was entirely in keeping with the decades-long decline that had gripped Dwayne’s front yard. Where there wasn’t dirt, there were rusting motorbike parts, and where there was neither, there were weeds, some of which had grown into fully fledged bushes. And littered around as though dropped by an absent-minded giant was the front end of an old taxi, a trailer on tyres that had lost their rubber years ago, and a wooden speedboat that was rotting into the ground where it lay.

However, on this particular morning, perhaps the most surprising feature of Dwayne’s garden was the Englishman in a suit who was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes while hiding in a bougainvillea bush by the front gate.

The man was Detective Inspector Richard Poole.

He’d been staking out Dwayne’s house for the last hour, and he was deeply unhappy. Not that that was much of a change for Richard. He’d been born unhappy.

As for why he was hiding in a bush, that could easily be explained by the fact that, three weeks before, Dwayne had announced that he wanted to study for his sergeant’s exam. Richard had been suspicious from the start, if only because Dwayne had never before tried to advance his career in any way. Frankly, it was sometimes a struggle to get him to attend his annual appraisal.

Something was up. Richard was sure of it. And when he learned that Saint-Marie Police regulations allowed officers studying for exams to spend a morning a week at home for ‘personal study’, he realised what it was. Dwayne had embarked on the whole endeavour as an elaborate ruse to bunk off work one morning a week, hadn’t he?

That’s why Richard had spent the last hour hiding inside a bush, a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes while trying to ignore the spiders and other stinging insects that could at any moment be crawling into his shirt collar. Or up his trouser leg. And he was very definitely ignoring the rivers of sweat that were running down his back, and the feeling of itching and prickly heat as it built up on his skin where it was touching his thick woollen suit. But he wasn’t leaving his bougainvillea bush. Not until he’d proven that Dwayne was skiving.

Richard saw movement and swivelled his binoculars just in time to see Dwayne throw back the curtains of his bedroom window and yawn. Luckily for Richard, the windowsill and brickwork saved him from finding out if the bottom half of Dwayne was as similarly naked as the top half, but this was the confirmation Richard had been looking for. He checked the time on his wristwatch. It was nearly 11am.

‘Got you,’ Richard muttered to himself.

Richard smashed out of the bush, opened the crumbling picket gate that led onto Dwayne’s property – and then, when he found that the picket gate had come off in his hands, he put the whole thing to one side so he could stride unencumbered up to Dwayne’s front door.

With a sharp rat-a-tat of his knuckles against the door, Richard announced his presence.

There was no answer, but Richard wasn’t in a rush. He waited a little while longer and then he knocked on the door again. But much louder this time. After a few more seconds, Richard was gratified to hear the slap of feet as Dwayne approached. The security chain rattled as it was unhooked, and the door finally opened.

‘And what time do you call this?’ Richard said, pointing to his wristwatch, before realising that the door hadn’t been opened by Dwayne.

In fact, it had been opened by a woman with mussed-up blonde hair. And she was barefoot, Richard noticed, just before he realised that this was because she wasn’t wearing any trousers for that matter. As for the rest of her clothes, it very much seemed to Richard as though the woman was holding a bath towel loosely across her front, and was possibly otherwise completely naked.

Oh heavens, Richard realised in a panic, the woman had answered the door wearing next to no clothes! He immediately fixed his eyes on an area of space directly above the woman’s left shoulder, causing the woman to laugh easily as she turned her head to call back into the room.

‘Dwayne, it’s your boss,’ she said with what Richard recognised as an Edinburgh accent.

Before Richard could ask how this woman could possibly know who he was, she turned and padded off into the recesses of the house, Richard making sure to keep his eyeline fixed firmly mid-air.

‘What are you doing here, Chief?’ Dwayne said as he came to the door. Richard finally lowered his eyes and was relieved to see that Dwayne had thrown on a bright blue silk dressing gown that depicted Chinese fighting dragons, even if it only just reached down to the top of his thighs.

‘What am I doing here?’

‘Sure. You’re supposed to be at work.’

Richard was rendered almost speechless. Almost.

‘You answer the door and have the gall to say that it’s me who should be at work?’

‘Oh I see, something’s up at the station, and you’ve come to pull me from my books.’

‘Your books?’

‘Sure. You know what it’s like. Thursday is for home study.’ As Dwayne said this, he winked slowly for his boss’s benefit.

‘Why did you just wink at me?’

‘Because, Chief, Thursday is for "home study",’ Dwayne said with another slow wink.

‘But that’s clearly not what’s going on here. Especially as I just saw you open the curtains to your bedroom wearing next to nothing. Not to mention your friend I just met, whoever she is.’

‘That’s Amy,’ Dwayne said with a delighted smile. ‘She’s something, isn’t she?’

‘I’m sure we can all agree she’s something, but she shouldn’t be walking around in a towel on Police time.’

‘But she’s not on Police time. She’s on holiday.’

‘I don’t care what she’s doing on the island,’ Richard interrupted, ‘it’s what you’re doing on the island that bothers me. Because you’re supposed to be using Thursday mornings for personal study time.’

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘Because it’s supposed to be what you’re doing!’

This statement seemed to take Dwayne by surprise.

‘But you never really meant that, did you?’

‘Of course I meant it!’

Richard took a deep breath to steady his rising blood pressure. Dwayne was a good copper in many respects, but it was safe to say that his and Richard’s approach to work weren’t entirely universe-adjacent.

‘Oh right,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘You actually want me to be doing personal study on my mornings off.’

‘They’re not mornings off, they’re study periods!’

‘Okay okay,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands, ‘you’ve made your point. I’ll make sure I work every Thursday from now. But don’t worry, no harm done. I mean, it’s not like there’s much going on on the island at the moment.’

Before Richard could reply that it really wasn’t for Dwayne to decide what was or wasn’t ‘going on’ on the island, they both saw a flash of light from the direction of Honoré harbour that was followed a few seconds later by the crack and boom of a massive explosion.

‘What the hell was that?’ Richard said as a thick cloud of black smoke started to blossom from about half a kilometre out to sea.

‘I don’t know about you, Chief, but that looked to me like an explosion.’

Richard turned back to his subordinate and dead-eyed him.

‘Dwayne. Get dressed. Personal study’s over.’

By the time Richard and Dwayne arrived at the harbour, the smoke from the explosion had long since cleared, and they found Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey and Police Officer Fidel Best securing the Police launch, which was really no more than an old wooden skiff that had a pair of massive engines strapped onto the back and the words ‘Saint-Marie Police’ written in white down the side.

‘Did you see that, sir?’ Fidel asked, as he pulled the old tarpaulin off the steering position.

‘Of course I did, or what do you think I’m doing here?’

‘Anyone know what it was?’ Dwayne asked.

‘I was on the veranda of the station when it happened,’ Camille said, ‘and I saw a ball of fire out in the harbour. I think a boat went up.’

‘Then we need to get out there,’ Richard said as he boarded the boat and sat down on the bench that ran down one of the sides.

‘Yes, sir,’ Camille said, joining him as Dwayne cast off. Camille started the twin engines, Dwayne stepped onto the boat and it started to move off.

‘Not too fast!’ Richard yelped as Camille opened the throttle and the boat started to surge through the water.

‘What’s that, sir?’ Camille asked over the roar of the engines.

‘Not too fast!’

‘Can’t hear you, sir,’ Camille shouted as Richard’s old school tie freed itself from his suit jacket and started flapping wildly behind him. It was perhaps a sign of how seriously Richard was holding on for dear life that he didn’t make any attempts to grab it and force it back down the front of his suit jacket so that sartorial decorum could be restored.

As Camille drove the boat in a wide arc around the clutch of yachts that were at anchor, she, Dwayne and Fidel shared grins, knowing how much their boss hated any kind of physical danger, real or imagined.

They came across their first piece of debris from the explosion less than a minute later and Camille cut the engines, the launch slowing to a slooshy stop almost immediately.

Looking about themselves, the Police could see that it was one of those days in the tropics of almost perfect stillness. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sea seemed to be breathing as it gently rose and fell, and there were sparkling diamonds of reflected light all around them on the water. But there were also what looked like thousands of different-sized pieces of ripped-up wood floating on the surface of the water.

‘Look, over there!’ Fidel said, and they all saw that there was something much larger floating in the water just off their port bow.

With a quick squirt of power, Camille steered the launch towards the object, and it revealed itself to be the back end of an old boat. The prow should have been pointing vertically downwards towards the sea bed, but Richard could see that the front half of the boat was missing from where the explosion had split it in two.

The section of the stern that was still just above the water line had the boat’s name written in white letters. It was called Soundman.

‘Anyone know who owns the boat?’ Richard asked, before he realised that his team was looking at an area of the hull just above the painted name. As Richard looked for himself, he could see why. There was a bright smear of what looked like blood. In fact, the way the smear ran down the wood, it was easy to imagine that someone who was heavily bleeding had briefly clung to the side of the boat before subsiding and slipping into the sea. There even appeared to be a rather macabre handprint in blood just to the side of the smear.

‘I’ll call the coastguard,’ Dwayne said, pulling out his phone. ‘They can maybe winch the boat out of the water and help us get it back to shore. And in answer to your question, Chief, Soundman belongs to a guy called Conrad Gardiner. He lives in a house on the beach to the side of the harbour.’

‘And what do you think happened here?’

Richard’s subordinates looked at each other, nonplussed.

‘It exploded,’ Fidel eventually said.

‘I can see it exploded,’ Richard said in exasperation. ‘But how did it explode? Do boats normally explode?’

This time it was Dwayne’s turn to answer.

‘No, Chief.’

Richard pulled a hankie from his jacket pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, his face, and then the back and front of his neck.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we need to keep this bit of boat above water. And we also need to keep our eyes peeled for any survivors.’

Even as Richard said this, he could see that there was no-one in the water near the debris, either alive or dead.

Within half an hour, the coastguard’s bright yellow rescue boat had arrived and was starting to winch the rear end of the boat onto its deck. This allowed Richard to order Fidel and Dwayne to stay with the coastguard and coordinate the safe return of the boat while he and Camille drove the Police launch in wide circles through the expanding spread of floating debris. All they found were various pieces of detritus – from plastic jerry cans to kitchen implements and even an old white plastic chair – but they couldn’t find anything that seemed to shed any light on exactly what had happened.

Once it became apparent that there was nothing left to find on the surface of the water, Richard ordered Camille to drive them back to harbour. When they arrived, Richard saw a small crowd of locals gathered on the quayside. Richard couldn’t imagine why. After all, the explosion had happened hundreds of metres away, there was nothing much for the crowd to see, but then he noticed that everyone seemed to be clustered around one woman in particular.

While Camille tied the boat up, Richard saw the crowd jostle the middle-aged woman forward, and he went to find out what was happening.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you all to move on,’ he announced as he came within earshot. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’

‘But is it true?’ the woman at the front asked.

‘Is what true?’

‘That it was Conrad’s boat?’

‘It’s still early in the investigation.’

‘But was it Conrad’s boat?’ she said again, almost begging.

Before Richard could reply that he couldn’t possibly comment, Camille pushed past him and took the woman’s hands in hers.

‘Natasha,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry. It was Conrad’s boat.’

‘Detective Sergeant?’ Richard said, irked that Camille had so effortlessly taken control of the situation.

‘Yes, sir?’ Camille replied.

‘You know each other?’

Richard indicated the woman. He could see that she was perhaps in her late forties, and was dressed somewhat dowdily, with a simple skirt, blouse and cardigan.

‘This is Natasha Gardiner,’ Camille said. ‘Conrad Gardiner’s wife.’

‘Oh,’ Richard said. ‘I see.’

‘But it was definitely his boat . . .?’ Natasha asked, her eyes desperate with worry.

‘I’m sorry,’ Camille said. ‘It was.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘We don’t know. But we didn’t see him in the water, so maybe he got away before it happened.’

Richard decided that enough was enough. If it was unprofessional that they should be talking about the incident before they’d even finished their first survey of the scene, it was doubly bad that they’d be doing so in front of a crowd.

‘Perhaps we could have this conversation somewhere a little more private?’ he asked Camille.

‘Good idea,’ Camille agreed. ‘Natasha and Conrad live only a couple of houses away, we can talk there.’

Natasha’s house was precisely the last place on earth Richard wanted to visit, but he couldn’t see a diplomatic way of explaining this to his partner, so he just harrumphed by way of an answer.

‘Good!’ Camille said, and then started to lead Natasha off, telling her how she shouldn’t prejudge the situation, there were a million things that may have happened, and maybe they’d find a very damp and embarrassed Conrad already waiting for them back at her house. This seemed to settle Natasha a little, but it did nothing to improve Richard’s mood as he followed behind.

Natasha’s house was a one-storey bungalow that led directly onto the little beach of Honoré. It had a green and white striped awning out front, and a couple of hanging baskets of flame-red flowers either side of the front door. The inside of the house was just as quaint, with simple furniture, and sea shells arranged on shelves.

‘Now, why don’t I get us all a glass of water,’ Camille said, heading to the sink. ‘And maybe you could tell us a bit about where Conrad was going this morning.’

‘Well, I don’t know. Not exactly. Only that Conrad always goes out fishing every morning.’

‘He’s a fisherman?’ Richard asked.

‘Oh no, he’s a music producer. Or he was for a time.’

‘So what does he do now?’

‘Well . . . you know. This and that. I mean, we don’t need so much money to get by, now we’re older.’

‘But he goes fishing every morning?’

‘Not every morning. Sometimes he doesn’t get up in time. But most days.’

‘And do you ever go out with him?’

‘Me? Oh no, I’m not welcome. You see, Conrad never catches anything much. For him, it’s more about getting away, I think. You know what men are like.’

Natasha addressed this last comment to Camille as she came over with two glasses of water.

‘Here you go,’ Camille said.

‘Thank you,’ Natasha said gratefully as she took her glass. ‘And you think he maybe wasn’t on the boat when it went up like that?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Camille said.

‘But we can’t really talk about specifics this early in the investigation,’ Richard said. ‘Although you should perhaps know that we found a smear of blood on the one remaining part of the hull we could find.’

‘Oh,’ Natasha said as this information sank in.

‘It may not be blood,’ Camille said with a warning glance at her boss to soften his approach. ‘And even if it is, it’s possible it belongs to someone other than your husband, of course.’

‘But he always goes out on his own. No-one else would have been with him. If you found blood . . .?’

Richard could see tears forming in Natasha’s eyes.

‘Can I ask,’ he said, ‘was your husband’s boat safe?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, are you surprised he had this accident?’

And with that, the tears came.

Richard looked at Camille, partly in helplessness, and partly in irritation. As far as he was concerned, it was entirely his partner’s fault that they now found themselves in this situation. This was far too soon to be talking to a key witness.

For her part, Camille ignored her boss’s disapproval and went and knelt by Natasha.

‘You mustn’t worry. We still don’t know what happened.’

‘But where is he?’

‘We’ll find him. If he’s out there, we’ll find him.’

As Camille continued to console Natasha, Richard realised that he was now something of a spare part to the whole conversation. So he wafted his arms a bit. He didn’t quite know why, but as he did so, he had the flash of a memory of being at college parties where, no matter what room he went into, no-one seemed to want to talk to him. In fact, Richard remembered how college parties had been a type of living hell. They were full of all of the beautiful and confident people, and he’d drift from room to room being roundly ignored. Before his memories spiked too painfully, Richard decided to keep himself busy by poking around.

On a nearby shelf, he found a collection of photos that charted the growth of a young woman from a baby up to the day she graduated from college, a mortar board on her head and a scroll in her hand. This was no doubt Natasha’s daughter. But Richard could also see photos of Natasha and a man he presumed must be Conrad, her husband. The photos were taken at parties, and Natasha and Conrad were laughing or dancing together in all of them. They looked a handsome couple, Richard thought to himself, and he realised he had trouble matching the vivacious young woman in the photos with the older woman he’d just met. But then, he had to remind himself, Natasha had just discovered her husband had possibly recently died.

As for the photos of Conrad, he looked as though he was always having a good time. He was laughing in every photo, or smoking a cigar, or raising a toast with his bottle of beer.

Seeing that Natasha was still crying, Richard slipped into a little corridor that led from the main room. He saw an open door. Telling himself that seeing as Natasha had invited him into her house he didn’t need a warrant, he pushed the door open a bit further, and what he saw inside shocked him.

The room had been trashed, with all its contents tipped over or dashed to the floor. What’s more, Richard could see that the room’s one window had been smashed, and there was a fist-sized chunk of concrete lying in the middle of the glass-strewn rug.

Clearly, someone had thrown the chunk of concrete in through the window, but what had happened next? Had this person then climbed in afterwards looking for something? Or had the room been smashed up just for the hell of it?

Richard was about to return to Natasha to find out what she knew about the break-in, when his eye caught something red and shiny sitting in the centre of a small writing desk to the side of the room. Unlike the rest of the furniture, this one table had been left standing. But what was on it?

Richard picked his way across the room until he could see the object more clearly..

It was a ruby.

A big, fat red ruby that was significantly larger than any jewel Richard had ever seen before. In fact, it was so large, Richard knew it couldn’t be real. It must have come from some kind of theatrical costumier’s or joke shop.

But what on earth was a ruby doing in the middle of the desk?