should Dwayne ever wish to finish building the floor above.
He never had.
In fact, as the years passed, Dwayne had come to like the way the steel rods jutted out of his bungalow. You always knew which house was his, he’d say proudly to anyone who asked.
But then, the unfinished house was entirely in keeping with the decades-long decline that had gripped Dwayne’s front yard. Where there wasn’t dirt, there were rusting motorbike parts, and where there was neither, there were weeds, some of which had grown into fully fledged bushes. And littered around as though dropped by an absent-minded giant was the front end of an old taxi, a trailer on tyres that had lost their rubber years ago, and a wooden speedboat that was rotting into the ground where it lay.
However, on this particular morning, perhaps the most surprising feature of Dwayne’s garden was the Englishman in a suit who was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes while hiding in a bougainvillea bush by the front gate.
The man was Detective Inspector Richard Poole.
He’d been staking out Dwayne’s house for the last hour, and he was deeply unhappy. Not that that was much of a change for Richard. He’d been born unhappy.
As for why he was hiding in a bush, that could easily be explained by the fact that, three weeks before, Dwayne had announced that he wanted to study for his sergeant’s exam. Richard had been suspicious from the start, if only because Dwayne had never before tried to advance his career in any way. Frankly, it was sometimes a struggle to get him to attend his annual appraisal.
Something was up. Richard was sure of it. And when he learned that Saint-Marie Police regulations allowed officers studying for exams to spend a morning a week at home for ‘personal study’, he realised what it was. Dwayne had embarked on the whole endeavour as an elaborate ruse to bunk off work one morning a week, hadn’t he?
That’s why Richard had spent the last hour hiding inside a bush, a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes while trying to ignore the spiders and other stinging insects that could at any moment be crawling into his shirt collar. Or up his trouser leg. And he was very definitely ignoring the rivers of sweat that were running down his back, and the feeling of itching and prickly heat as it built up on his skin where it was touching his thick woollen suit. But he wasn’t leaving his bougainvillea bush. Not until he’d proven that Dwayne was skiving.
Richard saw movement and swivelled his binoculars just in time to see Dwayne throw back the curtains of his bedroom window and yawn. Luckily for Richard, the windowsill and brickwork saved him from finding out if the bottom half of Dwayne was as similarly naked as the top half, but this was the confirmation Richard had been looking for. He checked the time on his wristwatch. It was nearly 11am.
‘Got you,’ Richard muttered to himself.
Richard smashed out of the bush, opened the crumbling picket gate that led onto Dwayne’s property – and then, when he found that the picket gate had come off in his hands, he put the whole thing to one side so he could stride unencumbered up to Dwayne’s front door.
With a sharp rat-a-tat of his knuckles against the door, Richard announced his presence.
There was no answer, but Richard wasn’t in a rush. He waited a little while longer and then he knocked on the door again. But much louder this time. After a few more seconds, Richard was gratified to hear the slap of feet as Dwayne approached. The security chain rattled as it was unhooked, and the door finally opened.
‘And what time do you call this?’ Richard said, pointing to his wristwatch, before realising that the door hadn’t been opened by Dwayne.
In fact, it had been opened by a woman with mussed-up blonde hair. And she was barefoot, Richard noticed, just before he realised that this was because she wasn’t wearing any trousers for that matter. As for the rest of her clothes, it very much seemed to Richard as though the woman was holding a bath towel loosely across her front, and was possibly otherwise completely naked.
Oh heavens, Richard realised in a panic, the woman had answered the door wearing next to no clothes! He immediately fixed his eyes on an area of space directly above the woman’s left shoulder, causing the woman to laugh easily as she turned her head to call back into the room.
‘Dwayne, it’s your boss,’ she said with what Richard recognised as an Edinburgh accent.
Before Richard could ask how this woman could possibly know who he was, she turned and padded off into the recesses of the house, Richard making sure to keep his eyeline fixed firmly mid-air.
‘What are you doing here, Chief?’ Dwayne said as he came to the door. Richard finally lowered his eyes and was relieved to see that Dwayne had thrown on a bright blue silk dressing gown that depicted Chinese fighting dragons, even if it only just reached down to the top of his thighs.
‘What am I doing here?’
‘Sure. You’re supposed to be at work.’
Richard was rendered almost speechless. Almost.
‘You answer the door and have the gall to say that it’s me who should be at work?’
‘Oh I see, something’s up at the station, and you’ve come to pull me from my books.’
‘Your books?’
‘Sure. You know what it’s like. Thursday is for home study.’ As Dwayne said this, he winked slowly for his boss’s benefit.
‘Why did you just wink at me?’
‘Because, Chief, Thursday is for "home study",’ Dwayne said with another slow wink.
‘But that’s clearly not what’s going on here. Especially as I just saw you open the curtains to your bedroom wearing next to nothing. Not to mention your friend I just met, whoever she is.’
‘That’s Amy,’ Dwayne said with a delighted smile. ‘She’s something, isn’t she?’
‘I’m sure we can all agree she’s something, but she shouldn’t be walking around in a towel on Police time.’
‘But she’s not on Police time. She’s on holiday.’
‘I don’t care what she’s doing on the island,’ Richard interrupted, ‘it’s what you’re doing on the island that bothers me. Because you’re supposed to be using Thursday mornings for personal study time.’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
‘Because it’s supposed to be what you’re doing!’
This statement seemed to take Dwayne by surprise.
‘But you never really meant that, did you?’
‘Of course I meant it!’
Richard took a deep breath to steady his rising blood pressure. Dwayne was a good copper in many respects, but it was safe to say that his and Richard’s approach to work weren’t entirely universe-adjacent.
‘Oh right,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘You actually want me to be doing personal study on my mornings off.’
‘They’re not mornings off, they’re study periods!’
‘Okay okay,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands, ‘you’ve made your point. I’ll make sure I work every Thursday from now. But don’t worry, no harm done. I mean, it’s not like there’s much going on on the island at the moment.’
Before Richard could reply that it really wasn’t for Dwayne to decide what was or wasn’t ‘going on’ on the island, they both saw a flash of light from the direction of Honoré harbour that was followed a few seconds later by the crack and boom of a massive explosion.
‘What the hell was that?’ Richard said as a thick cloud of black smoke started to blossom from about half a kilometre out to sea.
‘I don’t know about you, Chief, but that looked to me like an