The Killing Of Polly Carter. Robert Thorogood

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       Chapter 4

      The following day, Richard was sitting at his desk trying to focus on work, but his mind kept drifting back to the dinner he’d had with his mother the night before. It’s not that she’d been difficult in any way—if anything, she’d wanted only to talk about Richard’s life on the island—but, as an experienced copper, Richard got the impression that his mother was being evasive somehow. There’d been a reserve in her eyes he couldn’t place. And Richard’s disquiet was stirred further by the way his mother seemed to deflect any questions he asked about his father. ‘Oh you know what he’s like,’ she’d just said brightly, without any real meaning to her words at all.

      But perhaps most unsettling of all, Richard had discovered that his mother didn’t have any set plans for her visit, and he’d never known her travel anywhere without detailed notes and pre-planned itineraries. Instead, she told him that there was a lovely boy she’d met on reception called Karl who was putting together an itinerary for her, starting with a tour of a local rum distillery the following morning.

      In short, the whole evening had been quite peculiar for Richard, and as he’d pecked his mother on each cheek to bid her goodnight, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been ‘played’ somehow.

      However, Richard knew he was supposed to be researching Polly’s life before her death—not thinking about his mother—so he made himself look at the news article he’d got up on the computer monitor. And then he realised what the article said.

      ‘Good grief!’ he said in amazement.

      Camille sighed heavily. ‘What is it this time?’

      Richard indicated the webpage on his screen. ‘It says here that, back in 2005, Polly attended an orgy in Cheam.’

      ‘I told you, sir, they’ll print anything,’ Camille said, not even remotely for the first time.

      ‘But how do they know?’ Richard asked in awe. ‘Do you think a reporter was actually there?’

      There was a warm chuckle from behind Dwayne’s monitor. And then his face appeared, his eyes sparkling. ‘You’d be surprised, Chief.’

      ‘I certainly would be surprised if I found myself at an orgy in Cheam.’

      Richard made a note of this latest impossible-to-believe fact on his ever-expanding list of lies, truths, half-truths and PR puff he’d so far been able to uncover about Polly. He’d learnt that she’d at one time been the highest paid model in the world; that she was patron of a hedgehog sanctuary in Cornwall; that she was a well-known heroin addict who’d spent her life battling addiction; that she’d designed a range of clothes for toddlers; that there was still an active warrant for her arrest in Portugal for assaulting a press photographer; that she’d done the Duke of Edinburgh Outward Bound courses as a teenager and had a Gold Medal; and that she’d dated a famous rock star for many years, even though, as far as Richard could tell, the man in question didn’t look so much like a rock star as a bin man.

      The only useful facts Richard had so far been able to glean from the internet were that the previous September Polly had suffered a massive drugs overdose and nearly died. She’d been rushed to hospital, had her stomach pumped and had a blood transfusion, and had only just survived. There were photos all over the web that Richard had been able to find of a stick-thin Polly leaving the hospital on Saint-Marie wearing dark shades and using a walking stick twelve days after she was admitted.

      But if she’d nearly died from a drugs overdose in September, he’d also discovered that, after Christmas, just as the witnesses had said in the first interviews, she’d checked herself into a rehab clinic just outside Los Angeles and had spent ten weeks there. Richard knew all this because he’d found a press release online that had been issued by Polly’s manager Max back in March when Polly had got out. In his statement, Max said that Polly had finally won her lifelong battle with addiction and was now eager to return to her work as one of the most in-demand models in the world.

      Richard realised that his thoughts kept slipping back to what an orgy in Cheam would look like, so, before he got too confused, he jumped out of his chair and clapped his hands together in a way—far too late—he realised, probably made him look like a newly qualified Geography teacher.

      ‘Right, then, team,’ he said. ‘What have we got so far?’

      ‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, picking up his notes eager to report to his boss. ‘I’ve been looking into Phil Adams, and he’s from quite an impressive family. Before he retired, his dad was a teacher at Eton College, and his mum is a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office. As for siblings, he’s got an older brother and a younger sister. The brother’s a banker who owns his own hedge fund company—so he’s worth a fair bit—and his sister’s the British Ambassador to Slovenia.’

      ‘I see,’ Richard said, unable to stop himself from being impressed. Phil came from a super-successful family.

      ‘As for Mr Adams himself,’ Fidel continued, ‘he made his name with a string of violent gangster films back in the 1990s, but he’s not made much since then. And the main thing I’ve been able to dig up about him is, he was also in rehab in Los Angeles earlier this year.’

      ‘He was?’ Richard asked, thrown. ‘Was everyone in Polly’s house in rehab?’

      ‘No, sir, just Phil Adams and Polly Carter as far as I can tell. But I don’t know what clinic he was booked into, or why he was booked into it. It was just a few references in the gossip columns of a couple of UK newspapers. That following the failure of his latest feature film last year, he’d booked himself into rehab.’