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Murder in the Caribbean
Robert Thorogood
‘Deftly entertaining … satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie-style buttons’Barry Forshaw, The IndependentDEATH IN PARADISE is one of BBC One’s most popular series which averages 9 million viewers.DI Richard Poole is hot, bothered and fed up. He’s stuck on the tropical island of Saint-Marie, forced to live in a rickety old shack on a beach, and there isn’t a decent cup of tea to be found anywhere.When a boat explodes in the harbour, Richard and his team soon realise there’s a new murderer on the loose. But who is it? And why did the killer leave behind a ruby at the scene of the crime?As the police dig deeper, they uncover secrets that go back decades, and a crime from the past that can never be forgiven.Worse still, they soon realise this is only the beginning. They’ve got to catch the killer before there's another death in paradise…An original story from the creator and writer of the hit BBC One TV series, Death in Paradise, featuring on-screen favourite detective, DI Richard Poole.
ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC 1 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 and children.
Also by Robert Thorogood
A Meditation on Murder
The Killing of Polly Carter
Death Knocks Twice
Copyright (#ulink_2ad865e2-5f1b-5485-9d7e-6faa9751f3d0)
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Robert Thorogood 2018
Robert Thorogood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, 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 HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008238223
Praise for Robert Thorogood
‘Very funny and dark with great pace.
I love Robert Thorogood’s writing.’
Peter James
‘This second Death In Paradise novel is a gem.’
Daily Express
‘Deftly entertaining … satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie-style buttons.’
Barry Forshaw, The Independent
‘For fans of Agatha Christie.’
Mail on Sunday
‘A treat.’
Radio Times
‘This brilliantly crafted, hugely enjoyable and suitably goosebump-inducing novel is an utter delight from start to finish.’
Heat
‘A brilliant whodunnit.’
Woman
For Rosie Evans
Contents
Cover (#u00020526-eac8-5609-bedc-c7acadf26e11)
About the Author (#uad7f9f1e-fd2f-52a3-b864-de685040d90b)
Booklist (#ulink_5bf61c96-aea9-50f8-9e0a-1ff6d42828a4)
Title Page (#ud70a95e9-8f00-5f72-ba6e-1e24bc06cbcb)
Copyright (#ulink_7897b3ca-0d2f-54b5-b0b9-98a29dd9b79b)
Praise (#ulink_d9d4456b-e79c-5432-a482-914834c49040)
Dedication (#u3084fc1b-2d6e-532f-aabc-1d3024b4254f)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_cf3b1078-4397-5fa2-9bde-fd741b4d3634)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_636077a3-f7be-50d8-825c-e0938378c526)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_43c92f7f-9173-59ef-97b6-bb557ee771fb)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_41e3ab8d-8575-5941-b0a1-7ca8634b7ea5)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_67c84faa-98a1-503b-92df-e71e8fee3db3)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Where do you want me to start? At the beginning? Okay. Then you have to go back twenty years. That’s when it all began. With a single gunshot. Nothing before then matters. I was born, I lived my life, but it was in that moment that everything changed. Everything. You can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like. You think you can, but you can’t. I used to think the feelings inside me would go away. Somehow. That it wasn’t possible to feel like this forever. But guess what? It is. Not that I let on. I got good at hiding it. It used to surprise me, how everyone would look at me and think I was normal. They didn’t know about the furnace I had churning inside me. It became like a game. I’d see how normal I could be. No-one ever knew the truth. And over the years, the decades, that fire inside me changed. It got tighter and denser. And then one day, I realised it wasn’t a fire at all. It had become like a diamond. A diamond of pure hate. It made me laugh to feel that power inside me. Knowing that it was what was keeping me sane. And then, finally, the twenty years were up, and I knew I was ready. It was time. Time for revenge.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_93bd0464-42b4-5ccd-ba9a-420112e1c2f9)
Ordinary Police Officer Dwayne Myers had lived in the same house his whole adult life. It was a concrete-poured bungalow that was set in lush jungle that rose behind and above the sleepy town of Honoré on the western coast of the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie.
Where the money had come from to buy such a desirable plot of land was, fortunately for Dwayne, never quite established by the Saint-Marie Tax Office. He was also lucky that he’d not had a visit from the island’s Planning Officer since then because, while he’d started building a two-storey house, his money had run out half way through. This meant that when he took occupancy of his new home, his builders had only completed the ground floor, although they’d left the necessary steel rods poking up out of the ‘roof’ 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.’
