Death Knocks Twice. Robert Thorogood

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      ‘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?’

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