Death Knocks Twice. Robert Thorogood

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      As for the body itself, Richard could see that the man’s face was hollow-cheeked and craggy-lined from age. And although his skin was greyish-white, his cheeks and nose were a purple starburst of burst veins. He had clearly been a drinker. Adding to the impression of an old man who didn’t look after himself was an unruly pair of grey eyebrows and a long beard that seemed almost yellow rather than white, and which was very distinctly nicotine-stained around the mouth – from the cigarettes, Richard could smell from the man’s clothes, that he smoked.

      ‘It’s him,’ Lucy said simply.

      ‘This is the man you saw stalking you this morning?’

      ‘It is.’

      ‘And who you then chased into the jungle?’

      ‘That’s right,’ Lucy said, but Richard could see that something was making her frown.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Yes. It’s definitely him. It’s the man I chased into the jungle.’

      Lucy was still troubled by something.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Richard asked.

      Lucy kept on looking at the man on the ground.

      ‘Ms Beaumont, what is it?’

      ‘It’s just, I don’t know who he is.’

      ‘How do you mean?’

      ‘Well, I only got the briefest of glimpses of him before now. But I always reckoned I’d maybe recognise him if I ever got up close.’

      ‘And you don’t?’

      ‘I don’t,’ Lucy said. ‘In fact, I’ve no idea who that man is at all.’

      Richard looked at Camille.

      And then he looked from Camille back to Lucy.

      ‘Then who the hell is he?’

CHAPTER TWO

      ‘You’re sure you don’t recognise him?’ Richard asked.

      Lucy was troubled as she looked at the old man.

      ‘I don’t. But he’s definitely the man I saw this morning.’

      ‘Then, is there anyone else at the plantation who might recognise him?’

      ‘I don’t think there are any workers on the plantation at the moment.’

      ‘There aren’t?’ Richard asked, surprised.

      ‘It’s the wrong time in the growing season. But the rest of my family should be up at the house.’

      Richard looked at Camille, who got the message.

      ‘I’ll accompany you back to the house,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to bring whoever we can down here to see if they can identify the body.’

      ‘Of course,’ Lucy said.

      ‘And call Dwayne and Fidel, Camille,’ Richard said as Camille led Lucy out of the room. ‘Pull them off the bootleg rum case. We’re going to need them and the Crime Scene Kit up here pronto.’

      Once Camille and Lucy had left, Richard started to work the scene. First he took stock of the room. It was about forty feet across, entirely circular, and the walls and floor were constructed of stone. And from the way that the stone on the walls and floor was worn away, Richard could tell that the building was very old. Halfway around the room, there was an old metal-framed window to let light in, and on the far side of the room there was a slatted bench with a neatly-stacked pile of white towels waiting to be used.

      The shower area itself consisted of two tall sheets of glass, one either side of a mosaic-tiled area where the shower and control unit were.

      Richard went to the centre of the room and looked up at the cone-shaped roof as it rose high above his head. He could see that the wide opening at the very top of the cone had been blocked off and there was now just an old metal vent of some sort. There was no way a human could have come in or out of the building through the ‘chimney’.

      Richard had only seen the one bullet wound in the man’s chest and yet he’d definitely heard two shots being fired when he’d been in the jungle, so he decided to see if he could discover what had happened to the other bullet.

      Richard ‘walked the grid’ of the floor and soon found two bullet casings where they’d skittered to a stop on the tiles about five feet from the body. So if two bullets had been fired – as the two bullet casings suggested – where was the second bullet? Richard returned to the body, and it was only as he crouched down and really started checking it over that he found the second wound.

      When he unclasped the dead man’s right hand from the handle of the pistol, he saw a bullet hole in the base of the man’s right palm. Richard hadn’t noticed it when he’d first seen the body because the man’s hand had been holding the gun. And the hand had been in the wash of water that was flowing around the body, so most of the blood that had come out of the wound had been washed away. But now, as Richard looked more carefully, he could see a red sheen to the tiles that lay in between the man’s hand and the plughole.

      Now he thought about it, Richard realised he’d failed to notice this wound the first time around because, although there was an entry wound as the bullet had punched through the man’s palm and into his wrist, there was no exit wound. Richard guessed that the bullet had maybe hit the bones inside the wrist, and then stopped dead in its tracks.

      This was puzzling. If two shots were fired by this man, then he must have shot himself in the wrist first before shooting himself in the heart – seeing as the shot to the heart would have been the killing shot. Therefore, it was only logical to presume that the shot to the heart had come second. The shot to the wrist must have come first.

      But seeing as the man had died holding the gun in his right hand – suggesting that he was right-handed – how on earth did that first bullet get into his right wrist? The man would have to have been holding the gun in his left hand to fire it. And why would a right-handed man fire a gun with his left hand? And, having smashed the bones in his right wrist with that first bullet, the man would then have had to transfer the gun over to his right hand, somehow grip the gun with his broken hand, and then pull the trigger, firing the fatal shot into his heart.

      It didn’t seem in any way possible, did it?

      And now that Richard was thinking about it, what sort of suicide attempt was so botched that the first bullet missed the heart and hit the wrist instead?

      As Richard looked down at the body, he remembered how the area of tiles between the body and the drain had been dry when he’d broken into the room, suggesting that the shower had perhaps been turned on after the body had hit the ground.

      When understanding came to Richard, it was almost as a physical shock.

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