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      ‘Do I need to go everywhere with him? I am my own person, you know,’ she said.

      ‘No, of course you are,’ Richard quickly agreed. ‘It’s just, I’ve only really got time to drop you off at your hotel, I’m afraid. There’s been a murder.’

      Jennifer looked at her son and sighed.

      ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘I’ve been putting up with your father’s murders my whole life, I’m sure I can put up with yours.’

      As Jennifer said this, Richard saw a pair of passing nuns in wimples look over in shock and then skitter off in a panic.

      ‘But you should know,’ Jennifer finished, ‘I’m here to have a holiday whether you’re free to be a part of it or not.’

      ‘No. Of course. What hotel are you staying in, and I’ll take you there,’ Richard said.

      On the drive to the hotel, Richard and his mother exchanged pleasantries. He heard about Beth from number seven and the problems she was having with her son-in-law. He then heard the story of Professor Brodowski’s cat. You remember Professor Brodowski? Lives in number eleven? Has the daughter with the lazy eye? It was the typical flotsam and jetsam of life in his mother’s close, and Richard was able to keep up his end of the conversation without having to engage his brain too much. This allowed him to become enveloped by an increasing sense of unease as the journey progressed, if only because in all of his forty-four years, he’d never known his mother spend a single night away from his father. And now she’d booked a whole holiday on her own, and on the other side of the world at that. What was going on?

      Once Richard made sure that his mother was comfortable in what had turned out to be a far more top-end hotel than he was expecting, he made his apologies and returned to the police station.

      ‘So what have you got?’ Richard shot at his team as he strode back into the swelteringly hot station.

      Dwayne, he saw, was on the phone, Fidel was dusting Claire’s mobile phone for fingerprints, but Camille was at the whiteboard writing up the details of the case.

      ‘So how’s your mother?’ she asked him. ‘Safe flight?’

      ‘Yes, thank you,’ Richard said as brusquely as he could. He was not going to be sidelined by familial chit chat. ‘So did you manage to process the anonymous letters we found in the victim’s filing cabinet?’

      Camille looked at her boss tolerantly, accepting that he was refusing to play ball.

      ‘I took digital photographs of the front and back of all six letters for our records, but have sent the originals to the labs on Guadeloupe for analysis. We’ve also bagged and sent over the branch we found at the scene and which was covered in blood. And Fidel has also sent samples of the blood spatter he found in the dirt at the jump point.’

      Richard smiled tightly, as ever, deeply frustrated that Saint-Marie was too small an island to have any crime scene labs of its own.

      ‘Thank you. Then how about you, Fidel? How are you getting on?’

      ‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, looking up from where he’d been dusting Claire’s mobile phone on his desk. ‘First I tried dusting the key you found in the victim’s filing cabinet, but it’s so rusty and old, it’s not possible to raise a single print.’

      ‘It isn’t?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      ‘Then could I have it, please?’

      Fidel reached over to a small plastic tray where the key was sitting. He picked it up and handed it to Richard. Richard looked at it again, trying to divine its meaning, and then, with a disappointed tut to himself, he slipped the key into his trouser pocket.

      ‘But since then, I’ve been lifting fingerprints from Claire’s mobile phone that you found in the chandelier, and matching them with the exclusion prints we took from the witnesses.’

      ‘So whose prints are on the phone?’

      ‘I’ve only been able to raise twelve clear fingerprints. The rest of the phone is just a smear. And while eight of the fingerprints belong to Claire Carter, the remaining four fingerprints belong to her sister, Polly.’

      ‘I see,’ Richard said, working through the logic of what this might mean. ‘So, as there’s no way Claire could have put the phone in the chandelier herself—seeing as she’s confined to a wheelchair—that either means that it was put there by Polly, or her fingerprints just happened to be on the phone anyway, and it was put there by someone else who was wearing gloves so they didn’t leave their prints on the phone.’

      ‘Exactly, sir,’ Fidel said.

      Richard considered what Fidel had just told him, and then decided it was time to get on.

      ‘So, Polly Carter!’ he said, indicating the notes Camille had written up on the whiteboard. ‘A world-famous super-model is at home with her sister, Claire Carter; Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel; her manager, Max Brandon; her friend and film director, Phil Adams. Oh, and her live-in home help Juliette and Alain Moreau are also in the picture, although they say they were both elsewhere at the time of the murder.’

      ‘Assuming they’re telling the truth,’ Camille pointed out.

      ‘Indeed. Anyway, we know that Polly was a tricky woman to work for—according to Juliette, her home help. Although she could also be generous, according to her husband, Alain.’

      ‘And she could be hyper one minute and depressed the next,’ Camille added. ‘According to Max, her agent.’

      ‘And way too trusting, according to her good friend, Phil.’

      ‘She just sounds like your typical self-centred celebrity,’ Dwayne summed up for them all.

      Richard looked at Dwayne in mock surprise. ‘You know about the world of celebrities, do you, Dwayne?’

      ‘I know it’s not healthy,’ Dwayne said. ‘And if Polly’s been famous since her early twenties, she’s going to have a pretty warped view of the world, I can tell you that much, Chief.’

      ‘Very well. So that’s our victim. And this morning, she went for a walk with her sister, Claire.’

      ‘Even though this was the first time she’d been out for a walk with her sister on her own,’ Camille offered.

      ‘Quite so,’ Richard agreed. ‘And, according to Claire, once they were in the garden, Polly started losing her temper with her. And then—again, according to Claire—Polly took Claire to the top of the cliffs and threatened to kill herself before then going down some of the steps and throwing herself to her death. However, the wooden branch we later found covered in blood at the scene suggests that that’s not quite what happened. In fact, what the branch suggests is that someone was already waiting on the steps before Polly had arrived.’

      ‘The man in the yellow raincoat,’ Dwayne offered.

      ‘Precisely,’ Richard agreed. ‘But whoever this person was, they attacked Polly with the branch, knocked her to her death, and then hid the СКАЧАТЬ