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‘Not in the time we were at the hotel. Camille phoned us and told us you’d found a body, so we dropped everything and came straight here.’
‘Quite right,’ Richard said, already wishing he could kick the bootleg rum seller into the long grass. But experience told him that once the Commissioner had expressed an interest in a case, he tended to stay involved until the bitter end.
As Richard mulled how best to manage the Commissioner’s expectations, Fidel led them to a group of buildings just beyond the old drying shed.
‘Where exactly are we going?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry, sir. It’s just through this building.’
Fidel went through the open door and Richard was instantly hit by the aroma of coffee beans. It was overpowering, Richard thought, as he looked about himself. The room was full of some kind of fabric conveyor belt that led into and out of various old bits of cast iron machinery that were painted dark green. The paint was flaking in places, and there were signs of dark rust on some parts of the machinery.
‘What is this?’ Richard asked.
‘I think this is where they pack the coffee, sir,’ Fidel said, indicating a palette tray of empty hessian bags at one end of the assembly line. Richard could see the words ‘Premiere Bonifieur blend, Beaumont Plantation, Saint-Marie’ printed onto each bag. But before Richard could make much sense of how the machinery might have worked, Fidel was leading across the floor again and taking them through another open door that led out to the bright sunshine and jungle on the other side of the building.
‘You searched out here?’ Camille asked, impressed.
‘Well, it didn’t take me too long to gather, bag and log the physical evidence in the jungle clearing, so I thought I’d check the buildings near to the scene of the murder. See if I could find anything.’
‘And what exactly is it that you found?’ Richard asked.
‘That’s the thing, sir, I don’t know if it’s much, but I did find this.’
Fidel pointed down at the dusty ground, and Richard and Camille could see a set of tyre tracks in the dirt. And, as Fidel had suggested to the witnesses, they clearly belonged to a three-wheeled vehicle of some sort.
But if the family said they didn’t own any three-wheeled vehicles, then whose vehicle did these tracks belong to?
Richard saw that the tyre tracks continued along the side of the building for about twenty yards, and then they turned and disappeared between two thick bushes. On the further side of the bushes was the main road that serviced the plantation.
Richard realised that if someone had driven a three-wheeled vehicle up to this side of this building, they could have approached from the main road without being seen by anyone who was in the courtyard. It was essentially a private way for a vehicle to access the plantation. And then Richard remembered something else. There’d been a sudden burst of heavy rain when he and Camille had arrived at the plantation at about 11am. So had these tracks been left before or after the downpour?
Getting down on his haunches, he inspected the tyre tracks more closely, and could see that they – and the dirt all around – were pitted with indentations from where the heavy drops of rain had fallen.
‘Whatever vehicle was here, it left before the downpour at 11am,’ he said. ‘I can see that these raindrops fell onto the tyre tracks after they’d been made.’
‘Oh,’ Fidel said, disappointed.
‘However, you’re right, Fidel,’ Richard said. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s a three-wheeled vehicle up here recently enough that the tyre tracks are still fresh in the dirt, it didn’t arrive or leave by the main entrance, and none of the family drive a three-wheeled vehicle, or know of one operating on the plantation.’
Richard looked at the middle tyre print more closely, and saw a distinctive ‘cut’ in the mud that repeated every couple of feet or so. Whatever the vehicle was, the rubber of the middle wheel was damaged – which would possibly make identifying the vehicle that little bit easier.
‘As long as this remains an unexplained phenomenon, then I want you to get some plaster of Paris from the Crime Scene Kit, and make casts of these tyre prints. In particular, I’d like you to make sure you get a decent cast of this repeating mark on the front wheel.’ Here, Richard indicated the repeating ‘cut’ mark in the middle tyre’s print.
‘Yes, sir,’ Fidel said, thrilled that his lead was important enough to be taken seriously.
‘And while you’re doing that, Camille and I need to look at the murder scene again, because I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.’
‘We do, sir?’ Camille asked.
‘I think we do.’
Back at the murder scene, Richard and Camille found Dwayne photographing the body.
‘Have you been able to identify the victim yet?’ Richard asked.
‘Not yet, Chief. Although I think he could be a Brit.’
‘You do?’
‘He’s got some loose change in his pockets, and plenty of it is UK currency.’
‘He’s got British coins in his pockets?’
‘He has, sir.’
Dwayne handed over a small see-through evidence bag to his boss that was full of coins.
‘But I also found a receipt in his back pocket you might want to look at.’
Dwayne handed over an evidence bag that contained a cheap till receipt with blue ink so faded that it was hard to read.
‘You need to turn it over,’ Dwayne suggested.
Richard turned the evidence bag over and could see that on the other side of the receipt, someone had scribbled ‘11am’ in biro.
‘It says ‘11am’,’ Richard said. ‘He was killed just after 11am.’
‘Suggesting to me, Chief, that our victim was perhaps here for a pre-arranged meeting.’
‘Now that’s interesting,’ Richard said, and handed the evidence bag to Camille for her to inspect. ‘So this murder was possibly premeditated. Have we really got nothing beyond a few British coins to help us work out who this man was?’
‘I’m sorry, Chief. Although the victim’s got a pretty distinctive scar on the forefinger of his left hand.’
Dwayne crouched down and turned the victim’s left hand over, indicating an old scar that ran along the victim’s forefinger. It was white, ridged, and a good two inches long.
‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘So, apart from a scar on his left hand, a few British coins, and a cryptic till receipt with “11am” written on it, we don’t know who the victim is?’
‘That’s about it, sir,’ Dwayne agreed.
‘So what’s the problem?’ Camille asked, reminding Richard of what he’d said only a few minutes earlier.
‘It’s this window,’ Richard said as he led Dwayne and Camille over to the little metal-framed window on the far wall of the room. ‘Or to be more precise, this window, the vent in the ceiling, and that door,’ he said, pointing at the ceiling and broken-in door in turn as he spoke.
‘Why’s that?’ Dwayne asked.
‘Tell me what you see,’ Richard said as he indicated the window.
‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, buying himself time, ‘unless this is a trick question, it’s a window.’
‘You’re right, Dwayne. It’s a window. Camille?’
Camille’s instincts were already telling her where Richard was going with this. So she got out a pair of evidence gloves, snapped them on, and started checking out the window frame. She could see that it was fixed solidly to the stone casement, and the glass was held in place with old putty that had crumbled in places but had clearly not been tampered with in any way. But she knew the real test would be the latch that kept the window locked shut, and she gently touched it with her fingers. It didn’t move. In fact, she could see that the window’s latch was jammed tightly into the window frame.
What was more, Camille could see that the metal lever that allowed the window to open and close had an old butterfly screw on it that was tightly screwed down as well. Giving the butterfly screw a hard twist to the left, she unscrewed it enough that she could finally open the window. She then stuck her head outside. There was an undisturbed flower bed directly underneath the window with only a few weeds in, and the rest of the area behind the shower room was concreted over.
She then closed the window again, reset the catch in the window frame and re-locked the butterfly screw on the lever.
‘Okay,’ she pronounced, ‘so the window was locked. And it can only be locked from the inside.’
‘Precisely,’ Richard said, pleased that Camille had also worked it out.
Camille crossed to the centre of the room and looked up at the ceiling high above them.
‘And there’s no way in or out of this room through the roof. Not even with that vent built into the top.’
‘Agreed,’ Richard said. ‘It’s far too small.’
Camille led over to the main door.
‘And this door is seriously old, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You couldn’t even begin to tamper with the hinges, or get around it or under it in any way.’
‘Quite so,’ Richard said.
Camille inspected the thick iron bolt that ran across the back of the door. It was about three feet long, and was fixed very firmly inside a solid housing made of iron. And it was obvious that neither the bolt nor housing had been tampered with any more than the hinges of the door had been.
So Camille turned her attention to the door frame. It was just as solid as the door, and the lock worked by sliding the iron bolt across so it slotted into a deep hole that had been drilled directly into the door frame. She could see that the iron bolt had ripped through the wooden frame when Richard had smashed the door open with his sledgehammer.
‘As for the iron bolt,’ Camille said, ‘it was very clearly slid across when you bashed the door open. You can see where the bolt has torn through the wood of the door frame. And that’s why we’ve got a problem, isn’t it?’
‘Got it in one, Camille,’ Richard said returning to the centre room. ‘Because this room is entirely made of stone, and there are only three ways a human could have got out of it after the murder – those being through the window on the far side, out through the roof, or through this door. The ceiling is impossible, and both the door and the window were locked from the inside.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally dawning on him. ‘That’s the problem!’
‘It is, Dwayne,’ Richard agreed.
The three Police officers looked at each other.
‘That’s quite a problem,’ Dwayne said on all of their behalves.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Richard agreed. ‘Because, seeing as we found no-one else in here when we broke in, just how did our killer commit murder and then escape from a locked room?’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_e5b19506-5e8f-509d-96c8-d1e5c4938033)
When Richard and his team returned to the Police station, he set them to work. Dwayne was tasked with processing the physical evidence. In particular, Richard wanted him to lift whatever fingerprints he could identify on the gun that had very possibly been used to kill the victim – and the two shell casings they’d found near the victim. As for Fidel, he’d stayed at the plantation to create plaster casts of the tyre prints he’d found behind the farm buildings, so he returned to the Police station after everyone else. Once back, he laid out the three chunky blocks of white plaster of Paris on his desk. Each one was about a foot long – and six inches deep, and six inches wide – and the surface of each of the casts was covered in grit and dirt. Fidel set to cleaning them up with a make-up brush. Once that was done, Richard tasked him with trying to use the tyre casts to identify the make and model of the vehicle from a Caribbean-wide database of tyre prints.
As for Richard, seeing as the victim had been found with British currency in his pocket – and Lucy had said that the man had been lurking up at the plantation for the last few weeks – he decided to pull the border records for all of the Brits who’d arrived at the Saint-Marie airport in the last eight weeks. But when he spoke to the Head of Security at the airport, he discovered that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The man informed Richard that maybe as many as five thousand British tourists had arrived on the island in the previous eight weeks, and while the airport had CCTV footage of everyone as they made their way through passport control, the only way of doing any kind of visual search for the victim would be to sit down and watch every minute of airport CCTV footage from the previous eight weeks.
This was clearly impractical, so Richard asked him to send through the names of every British traveller above the age of fifty who’d arrived on the island in that time, and who’d been travelling on his own. This was because Richard had already guessed – based on the evidence of the tawdry hideout they’d found in the jungle – that their victim had perhaps been operating on his own. In fact, as Richard explained the parameters for the search he wanted carried out, he realised that there would possibly be a few dozen Brits a day who met the criteria. After all, how many fifty-plus British men travelled to a Caribbean holiday destination on their own? And then, once the Head of Security had sent the details over, Richard knew he could either cross-reference the names with whatever hotels were listed on their immigration forms, or – given that he’d now know what flights they’d arrived on – he could just pull the airport CCTV footage for each person’s arrival, and see if he could identify the victim visually. And here, Richard knew that their victim’s long grey hair and yellow/white beard should make him easy to spot.
In fact, Richard realised, if their victim was indeed from the UK and had arrived at any time in the last eight weeks, it might be possible to work out his identity in the next few hours.
‘You’re right,’ the Head of Security said at the other end of the phone. ‘I’d even go so far as to say that you’re onto something there.’
‘Thank you,’ Richard said.
‘Although, it’ll take longer than a few hours to identify your British traveller.’
‘Why? The list won’t be very long, will it?’
‘Oh it’ll barely be a few hundred names. It’s just going to take a few days to get the list to you, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If not longer than a few days. Tell you what,’ the man paused as though he were about to do Richard a massive favour. ‘I reckon I can get the list of solo Brits to you by the beginning of next week.’
‘What?’
‘Or soon after.’
‘But it’s only Thursday now. Surely you’ve already got this information on your system?’
‘Of course. We take everyone’s details who arrives on the island. We’re a professional outfit.’
‘Then it should take all of about thirty seconds to create a search on your system for solo British travellers from the last eight weeks aged fifty years and over, and then you can email me the results. I could start working on this in the next few minutes!’
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
And then the man coughed to clear his throat.
‘What’s that?’ Richard asked.
‘Nothing. It’s just – well, let me put it like this. I agree, your plan makes perfect sense. It’s just we had a bit of an IT problem at the end of last week.’
‘You did?’
‘So I don’t think it will be that easy. But we’ll definitely be able to get you the results you want at some point next week. Or the week after.’
‘What sort of an IT problem?’
‘What’s that?’
‘You said you had “a bit of an IT problem”. So I just wanted to know. What sort of IT problem did you have?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does to me,’ Richard said, feeling his blood pressure rising. ‘Seeing as I’m trying to run a murder case here.’
‘Yes. Well, when you put it like that, that makes a lot of sense.’