ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC One TV series, Death in Paradise. He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1972. When he was 10-years old, he read his first proper novel – Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House – and he’s been in love with the genre ever since. He now lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire with his wife, children and an increasingly cranky Bengal cat called Daniel. ISBN: 978-1-474-03809-6 THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER © 2015 Robert Thorogood Published in Great Britain 2015 by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental. By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher. Version: 2018-07-23 For Charlie and James Table of Contents Detective Inspector Richard Poole sat on the verandah of his beachside shack looking up at the cloudless Caribbean sky in inarticulate outrage. A passing parrot had just crapped in his cup of tea. It didn’t seem possible, but Richard had watched the little bugger fly in over the sea and defecate in mid-air, the little ball of released guano flying in a perfect parabola only to land in his English Breakfast Tea with an accuracy, Richard realised, that Barnes Wallis could only have dreamed of. In a spasm of disgust, Richard sloshed the contents of his china cup over the balustrade and tried to return his attention to the book he’d been reading. It was an old hardback he’d found at the back of the police station called A Field Guide to the Insects of the Caribbean, and he’d been fascinated by what he’d so far been able to learn from it. For example, he’d had no idea that the brightest bioluminescent insect in the world wasn’t in fact the firefly, but was a species of click beetle that lived in the Caribbean called the Fire Beetle. But it was no good, Richard couldn’t settle back into his book, and instead he found himself glancing nervously back up at the sky every few seconds. After all, what if another parrot came for him out of the sun? Richard sighed heavily to himself. Honestly, when you got down to it, the Caribbean was a bloody nightmare from start to finish. It didn’t help that he had already been in a bad mood that morning, even before the aerial bombardment. This was because Richard had
