immaculate straw hat with a hatband in the same pink floral fabric as her dress, Jennifer Poole stepped out into the sunshine, a black suitcase-on-wheels at her side.
Richard took half a step forward and raised his hand in a nearly-but-not-quite wave.
‘Hello, Mother,’ he said.
‘Oh, Richard, what a terrifying journey!’ Jennifer said, as she wheeled her suitcase over to her son. ‘I mean, they call it economy, and they really mean it, don’t they? Before we’d even left London, I was trying to get the dust out of my seat, and do you know what? The woman sitting next to me told me I should just put up with it. Can you imagine? And when I started using my wipes on the fold-down tray in front of me—and on her fold-down tray—she called a flight attendant over and point blank complained. Which made for a frosty silence between her and me for the next eight hours, I can tell you. But by the time we landed at Guadeloupe, she was sneezing, so for all she gave me funny looks whenever I used the antibacterial gel on my hands, I’m not the one who’s going to come down with Legionnaires’ Disease.’
Even Richard was pretty sure that no one caught Legionnaires’ Disease from aeroplane air conditioning systems. But before he could tell his mother this, she was off again.
‘And when we landed in Guadeloupe, I couldn’t believe how hot it was. I mean, I expected the tropics to be hot, but I wasn’t expecting heat like this, and I remember the heatwave of 1976. But I’d decided I’d just have to cope with it when they took us to the plane they told us we were transferring to Saint-Marie on. Well! I could see rust around the rivets on the wings. And you know how your great uncle was in the Fleet Air Arm, and he always said you should never get in a machine that didn’t look as though it was looked after with pride?’
Richard noted the pause, and gave the correct response.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Well, I very nearly didn’t get on it, and then—when I did—I discovered that I was sitting next to a man who had a chicken on his lap in a crate. I mean, it was a very fine-looking chicken, but you don’t expect to see a chicken on a commercial flight, do you?’
Again, Richard gave the correct response. ‘No, Mother.’
‘But I’m here now, I suppose, and it really is wonderful to see you.’
Jennifer stopped talking long enough to look at her son.
‘And I must say, you look very smart.’
Richard couldn’t help but feel a little burst of pride at this compliment.
‘So where’s Dad?’ he asked, and recognised the maternal frown at once.
‘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.