Dwayne said he’d be. But even more so.’
Camille smiled. She’d spent a long time with Richard, and she’d long ago realised that most of his sudden squalls of anger and stick-in-the-mud curmudgeonliness came from an upbringing that had straitjacketed him from the moment he put on his first suit, shirt and tie aged four. Camille believed that inside her boss, just as surely was the case with every human, there was a free spirit bursting to get out. In the meantime, she found herself a wry spectator to his wrecking-ball social interactions. And the fact that Richard was utterly dedicated to solving crimes went a long way in her mind to making up for all his other inadequacies. Mind you, she thought to herself, he’d crossed a line when he’d started spying on Dwayne with a pair of binoculars. She knew she’d have to speak to him about that later on.
Richard returned from his phonecall, energised.
‘Okay, that was Fidel, Camille. He says he’s found something on the boat we need to see. At once. Amy, you’ll have to excuse us.’
‘Of course,’ Amy said, and called out, ‘Send my love to Dwayne,’ as she started clipping down the stairs to leave the Police station.
‘I’d rather not,’ Richard replied before turning back to Camille. ‘Right then, seeing as we’ve now got two scenes to work, I suggest we split up. You take the Crime Scene Kit back to Natasha and Conrad’s house. Dust the window frame and windowsill for fingerprints. Also, someone should see if there are any prints on that chunk of concrete that was used to smash the glass. And while you’re about it, check for footprints in the soil outside the window, and do a quick door-to-door. Did any of the neighbours see or hear anything suspicious like breaking glass before or after the explosion this morning? And above all else, make sure you bag the paste ruby. It was left on the desk for a reason, and I suggest we find out what it was.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Dwayne came out of the station holding the large metal flight case that was the station’s Crime Scene Kit.
‘Dwayne,’ Richard said, ‘Camille will need the kit for herself, she’s working a secondary crime scene. So I want you down at the harbour running a door-to-door. And also go yacht to yacht for that matter. Did anyone see Mr Gardiner go out on his boat this morning? And was anyone with him, or was he on his own? We still don’t know who was on his boat when it exploded.’
‘Were you really spying on me?’
‘We don’t have time for this now, Dwayne. I also need you to get onto the Saint-Marie dive school. I want them in their scuba kit and scouring the sea bed where the boat went down. I want a list of everything that sank from Conrad’s boat.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Camille said to Dwayne. ‘I’ll talk to him about snooping on you.’
‘Not now you won’t,’ Richard said, heading down the stairs. ‘I need to see Fidel, and you both need to get on with your jobs.’
A few minutes later, Richard was striding along the concrete quay towards where he saw the back half of Conrad’s boat resting on its side. Fidel was erecting ‘Police – Do Not Cross’ tape around it, and to the side of the quay, the Saint-Marie Coastguard were making good the winch on their boat.
‘Okay, Fidel, what have you got for me?’ Richard called out as he approached.
‘Well, sir, the explosion wasn’t an accident.’
‘You know that?’
‘I do, sir.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Let me show you.’
Fidel led Richard around the structure, and Richard could see that the wooden sides of the hull were jagged and torn in a way that looked as though a leviathan had risen from the deep, snapped the boat in two with its jaws – and this was the bit of the boat it had then tossed aside.
Passing the sharp edges of the hull, Richard saw that the interior of the boat had been mostly ripped out by the explosion, although there were still plenty of old pipes and rusting metal fixings sticking out at crazy angles. Mercifully, there were no smears of blood here, but Richard watched as Fidel stepped up to a dirty grey tube that ran along the inside of the boat and which was fixed with red cable ties.
‘Okay, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘I think that this section of the boat was once the engine compartment. And this tube here was the fuel inlet to the engine.’
‘So where’s the engine?’
‘I imagine it got blown from its housing and sank with everything else. But the thing is, on boats like this, the engines tend to be at the rear. In a tight and enclosed space directly under the driving position.’
‘Okay,’ Richard said, wondering where Fidel was going with this.
‘It can make them seriously dangerous if there’s any kind of cut or tear in the fuel inlet. Like we’ve got here.’
Fidel indicated a point on the pipe with his forefinger, and Richard could see that there was a deep cut that ran along it for about three inches.
‘How did that get there?’
‘I’ve looked at it, and it’s pretty neat. I think someone slit it open using a sharp knife.’
‘But why would they want to do that?’
‘Well, a tear in the fuel line like this isn’t enough to let much petrol leak, but it’s enough to let fumes from the petrol get out.’
‘Oh,’ Richard said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘Petrol fumes that then build up inside the enclosed space.’
‘Exactly, sir. And then, the tiniest spark and the whole thing goes up.’
‘But how did you find that rip?’ Richard asked, looking at all the dozens of feet of pipes that ran around the inside of the boat’s hull.
‘Well, sir, I was carrying out a visual inspection of the wreck when I found this.’
Fidel walked around the inside of the boat and pulled down a mess of what looked like electric cables that were tied together with parcel tape. But as Richard looked more closely, he saw that there was something else that the parcel tape was holding in place.
It was a mobile phone.
What was a mobile phone doing taped to the inside of an engine compartment?
As Richard looked again, he could see that it was one of the old-fashioned plastic phones that had no touchscreen, it just had buttons and the smallest of screens for the minimum of text.
But there were also two thin electric cables emerging from the housing of the phone – and the plastic at the end of each cable was stripped back to reveal copper wires. Richard took a step back, the sheer enormity of what Fidel had uncovered hitting him.
‘Good grief,’ he said.
Someone had sliced into the fuel pipes of the boat so that the enclosed engine compartment would fill with petrol fumes. But this person had also taped a doctored phone inside the same engine compartment. When the boat was heading out to sea, the compartment filled with petrol vapour, and this person had then rung the number of the mobile phone. The incoming call had turned on the circuit that was supposed to drive the motor that made the phone vibrate, but it had been re-routed to a couple of cables that led outside the casing. And once the current was flowing in these two little cables, the electricity had arced and caused the tiniest of sparks.
The spark had caused the petrol to explode, and the boat had blown apart.
Despite the heat, a shiver ran down Richard’s spine.
Fidel was right. Conrad hadn’t died in some tragic accident at sea.
He’d been murdered in cold blood.