The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries

by Fiona Snyckers

  Laurent Task seemed to be struggling for words. “I shouldn’t have had all that wine last night. It’s messing with my aim. I normally do much better groupings than that.”

  His wife laughed. “Say congratulations to Ms. Park, my love. It’s not often that the great Olympian is bested at archery.”

  Task pulled himself together.

  “Where did you learn to shoot, Ms. Park? That was very impressive.”

  “I grew up with a bow in my hand. We used them to hunt for food. It was never a sport for us, although I believe some people enjoyed it. You never released your arrow until you were sure of a kill-shot. If you got it wrong and wounded the animal, you would have to track it all day if necessary to put it out of its misery. We tended not to miss.”

  The Tasks looked at her curiously. Marie was the first to get it.

  “You must have grown up in the forest. Are you one of those villagers?”

  “I was,” said Eulalie. “I’ve lived in Queen’s Town for a long time now. My father is a fletcher and a great marksman. Can you tell me where you were and what you were doing two nights ago, between midnight and six in the morning?”

  The Tasks looked taken aback.

  “Two nights ago?” said Marie. “That was when you went to Queen’s Cay, wasn’t it, darling?”

  “That’s right. One of my American suppliers was in town. He was staying on Queen’s Cay. Laurie and I went to meet with him and ended up spending the night there after we missed the last ferry back. My wife was at home alone. Our daughter works on Logan Cay and only comes home at weekends.”

  “Where did you stay on Queen’s Cay?”

  “The Horse and Buggy B&B.”

  “Did you and your son share a room, Mr. Task?” Eulalie asked.

  “As a matter of fact, we did. May I ask what this is all about?”

  “Just routine questions following up on information we were given. Tell me, Mrs. Task, does this look familiar at all?”

  She held up a picture of the navy polo shirt, angling her phone so that only Marie could see the image.

  “Why, yes,” she said. “That looks just like Laurent’s T-shirt from the Sydney Games. He has another one from the Athens Games. He often wears them. It’s hanging in his closet right now. Do you think an Olympian might have done this?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “What a terrible thought. But at least you know now it definitely wasn’t Laurent.”

  They turned back to the clubhouse. As they walked, Eulalie noticed Laurent Task looking back at the target where her arrows were grouped in a tight circle.

  Chapter 16

  Laurent went to teach his next class, and his wife disappeared into her office. Eulalie stopped at the Enquiries desk to speak to their son.

  “You and your father spent the night on Queen’s Cay two days ago, right?”

  “That’s right. Did my dad tell you about it? One of our suppliers was in town. He has horses stabled on Queen’s Cay and likes to visit them whenever he’s here. We often take the ferry over and meet him there. We missed the last ferry back, so we stayed over until morning.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “At the Horse and Buggy. Do you know it? They do an amazing full English breakfast in the mornings. You should totally try it.”

  “Maybe I will. Did you and your father…”

  “Although, you’re probably more of a fan of continental breakfasts, aren’t you? I can hear a bit of French in your accent. I’m good at accents.”

  “Did you or your father leave the B&B at all during the course of the night? Any time before about six in the morning?”

  “Nope. Why would we do that?”

  “Does your father like ice-cream?”

  Laurie laughed. “Ice-cream? My dad? Have you even met the guy? Does he look like someone who eats ice-cream? My dad is a health nut. Tofu, yes. Ice-cream, no.”

  “Thanks, Laurie. I’ll see you around.”

  Eulalie turned and walked out. She could feel his eyes boring into her back as she went. He would no doubt repeat her questions to his parents, and any uneasiness they might be feeling would be compounded.

  Eulalie checked her phone before getting on her Vespa. There was a message from Chief Macgregor.

  Chief Macgregor: We have a tentative ID on today’s body. Come to the station when you get the chance.

  It was lunchtime. As Eulalie swung into Lafayette Drive, she stopped off at one of her favorite food trucks for a sandwich mixte – a baguette with ham and cheese on it. She picked up one for Chief Macgregor too but asked the server to add salad to it. Then she ordered a couple of fruit smoothies to assuage her guilt at skipping the salad.

  “Kale?” the server asked, holding up a handful of green stuff.

  She repressed a shudder. “You can add it to one of them. Leave the other one pure, thanks.”

  She texted Chief Macgregor that she was coming in and bringing lunch. Then she loaded the food into the basket at the back of her scooter and drove to the police station.

  “Afternoon, Manny,” she greeted the desk sergeant on duty.

  “Hey, Eulalie. What’s up?”

  Eulalie held up the brown bag. “Lunch for me and the chief. Do you know if he has eaten yet?”

  “I think he has been too busy with the new body they found this morning. Three bodies in a few days is a lot for Prince William Island. Governor Montand is not happy. The chief has spent half the morning on the phone trying to calm him down.”

  “I hope he was tactful.”

  Manny’s eyes twinkled. “You know the chief. Tact is not his strong suit. The thing is though, the governor responds well to his brand of common sense. The chief never gets emotional, which seems to calm the governor right down. I can’t say I felt very calm myself when I heard they’d found a third body. What’s going on, Eulalie? Don’t tell me we have a serial killer here on the Island?”

  “I don’t know, Manny. The deaths are years apart. What kind of serial killer waits fifteen years between murders? It’s a mystery, all right.”

  “Makes me feel ill. Speaking of which, why is that smoothie grey?”

  “It’s the chief’s. It has kale in it.”

  “Gross.” Manny pointed across the charge office. “There’s the chief now. Looks like he finally got off the phone.”

  “I brought lunch,” said Eulalie holding up the bag for Chief Macgregor to see.

  “That’s very nice, thank you.” He came up and gave her a kiss before the interested gaze of Manny.

  Eulalie scooped up the food and led the way to his office.

  “I don’t think you should kiss me in front of your colleagues,” she said when the door was closed.

  He paused in unbagging his food and frowned. “Oh? I thought I was supposed to. The other morning, you called me back because I had forgotten to kiss you.”

  “That’s different. We were alone then.”

  He thought for a moment. “You should send me a memo outlining when it’s okay to kiss you and when it’s not.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  As they ate their lunch, Chief Macgregor slid a stack of papers across the desk towards Eulalie.

  “What’s this?” She flicked through them. “Old newspaper reports?”

  “They are articles about missing persons. Detective Wright narrowed it down to two possibilities. The one was an eighteen-year-old girl – a student at Queen’s Town High. She disappeared during her senior year.”

  “Rochelle Chirac,” said Eulalie. “I remember that. It happened the year after we moved to Queen’s Town. I was in middle school, and Rochelle was a senior in high school. I didn’t know her at all, but everyone was talking about it. Wasn’t she a runaway?”

  “She might have been. She had problems at school and at home. After all these years, she has never turned up and is still officially on the missing persons register. Dr. Autry has tentatively dated the body to about fifteen years ago, so Detective Wright went lookin
g for young women who disappeared within that time frame. Rochelle Chirac was one of them. She’s not our number-one candidate, though.”

  “Who is?” Eulalie flicked through the news articles. “This girl, Agnes Nilsson?”

  “She’s a strong possibility. She was sixteen years old and also thought to be a runaway at the time. She disappeared the year after Rochelle Chirac.”

  “Why is she a strong possibility?”

  “She had a fight with her parents and stormed out of the house. They were Swedish contract workers here on a one-year contract. He was an engineer working on the hydroelectric unit at the dam, and she was a biochemist at the university. They had a big blowup because Agnes wasn’t happy here. She wanted to go back to Stockholm to be with her friends. Her parents insisted she would settle in when she started school, but that upset her even more. She stormed out of the house. They expected her to return within the hour. When two hours had passed, they reported it to the police.”

  “Has Dr. Autry made a finding on the age of the girl yet?”

  “She is leaning more towards sixteen than eighteen. There is a bone in the wrist that is more solidly fused at eighteen than at sixteen. This girl doesn’t have that.”

  “It sounds as though Agnes went for a walk around the block to blow off steam. It doesn’t sound as though she planned on never coming back.”

  “There’s also the dress she was wearing.”

  “Yellow with black polka dots,” said Eulalie, looking at a photograph of a smiling young girl. “Did you find something like that on today’s body?”

  “The material is very degraded and discolored, but yes, we think so.”

  “Where are her parents now? There must be dental records you can use for comparison?”

  “Her parents finished their year’s contract here on the island and went back to Sweden. Detective Wright says they still phone him once a year to ask if there has been any progress on the case. If there are dental records, they’ll be in Stockholm. I’ll wait until Dr. Autry has completed her autopsy. If her findings are still consistent with Agnes Nilsson, I’ll contact the parents and ask about the records.”

  He looked haggard at the prospect. Eulalie gave his arm a squeeze.

  “It’s better to know than not to know,” she said. “You’re doing them a favor. It might not be the news they were hoping for, but they will finally be able to bury her and that will bring them a kind of peace. Was Agnes their only child?”

  “At the time, yes, but Detective Wright tells me they subsequently had twins who are about ten years old now.”

  “It’s better to know than not to know,” Eulalie repeated.

  He balled up the wrapper from his sandwich and lobbed it into the wastepaper basket. “What are we dealing with here? An opportunistic killer?”

  “It looks like it. There’s no way he could have known that those girls were going to do what they did. They just happened to be out on the street at a time when he came along.”

  “Two teenage girls and one young woman,” said Chief Macgregor. “All of them had temporarily left their homes, families, or significant others in a state of emotional upset.”

  “They were all feeling sorry for themselves. They were vulnerable enough to offload their indignation onto a sympathetic stranger. He stopped to give Fauve a lift. He might have done the same with the other two.”

  “Lisa Lavalle’s boyfriend says she threatened to hitchhike to the airport. He could have picked her up too.”

  “And Agnes Nilsson might have got lost,” said Eulalie. “Where were the family living?”

  “In Sea View.”

  “There you go. It’s a confusing place. All the roads look the same and have similar names. She probably stormed out the house and got lost. He might have offered to take her back home.”

  “But instead he drove her to Robson’s Field and killed her with a blow to the back of the head.”

  “Is that how the latest girl died?” asked Eulalie.

  “The back of her skull is cracked. Dr. Autry says it was probably the cause of death.”

  The phone on Chief Macgregor’s desk began to ring.

  “I hope this isn’t the governor again.” He looked at the caller display. “No, it’s Dr. Autry’s office.”

  “There must be news.”

  He picked it up. “Macgregor?”

  He listened intently. Then he thanked the caller and put down the phone.

  “That was Dr. Autry. None of the lab work is back, but she gave me her preliminary findings. The victim was a young Caucasian woman, about fifteen to sixteen years old. She was killed by a single blow to the back of the head. It seems to have been administered by a powerful, right-handed person carrying a hard and heavy instrument. Her hair appears to have been fair.”

  Eulalie glanced down at the photos of Agnes Nilsson looking like a typical blond Scandinavian teenager.

  “One of her bottom, rear molars had recently been drilled and filled, which bodes well for dental records.”

  “You have enough to justify phoning her parents.”

  “I’ll do that now. What are you going to do?”

  “I want to speak to the two Olympians I haven’t interviewed yet – Thashin Bapanda and Jules Chatel. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fit them both in this afternoon. Thashin Bapanda works on St. Michael’s Cay.”

  “The other thing I have to do is draft a media release about the latest body,” said Chief Macgregor. “We could really do with a dedicated media liaison officer. More funding that the governor is unlikely to approve.”

  Instead of going straight back to the office, Eulalie stopped off at Sweet as Flowers, her friend Fleur du Toit’s confectionary and coffee shop. The lunchtime rush was winding down. Fleur greeted her with a smile and a wave as she rushed past with a tray. When she came back from the kitchen, her hands were empty, and she looked more relaxed.

  “Are you here to eat?” she asked, as Eulalie gave her a double cheek kiss.

  “No, I had lunch with Donal. Nothing romantic,” she added when she saw Fleur’s face. “We’re working on a case.”

  “I think it’s sweet that the two of you have a professional relationship as well as a personal one.”

  “It’s certainly convenient. Didn’t you say something about wanting to visit St. Michael’s Cay one of these days?”

  “I did. I want to speak to the head of catering at the school.”

  “I’m heading out there this afternoon to talk to one of the teachers. Do you want to come along? I need to leave in the next half hour.”

  Fleur held up a finger for Eulalie to wait while she rushed back to the kitchen to pick up an order.

  “I guess I can be ready in half an hour,” she said when she came back. “I’ve been meaning to go out there for weeks now, but it never seems like a good time. This will force me to get it done. Sit and have coffee while I finish up here.”

  Eulalie settled herself at the counter and checked messages while she waited for Fleur to finish up.

  There was an email from Mrs. Belfast detailing her investigation into the two men who accompanied the Prince William Island Olympic team to Sydney – Sophie Webb’s husband, Harry Webb, and Thashin Bapanda’s father, Dev Bapanda. She included current numbers and addresses for both of them. There was no indication that either had ever been in trouble with the law. Eulalie decided to interview them only if her talks with the four Olympians drew a blank.

  Mrs. Belfast had also emailed queries about ongoing contracts with regular clients, so she answered those as thoroughly as she could. The last email had no text – just an attachment. Eulalie opened this and smiled. It was a photograph of Paddy the cat sitting in his tartan basket under the sign that said Eulalie Park Investigations. Mrs. Belfast must have taken it from the opposite side of the road. It was captioned, “For the website?”

  Mrs. Belfast had been nagging Eulalie for weeks now to liven up her rather dry and professional-looking website. The picture was certa
inly cute, but Eulalie wasn’t convinced it sent the right message to the banks, insurance companies and attorneys firms that made up the bulk of her clientele.

  She shot back a quick message promising to think about it. Then she looked up as Fleur appeared at her side.

  “Ready to go?”

  Chapter 17

  The south-east corner of Prince William Island was bordered by a chain of smaller islands called cays. Some of these were inhabited and in regular use, while others were deserted. Passenger ferries plied the waterways between Queen’s Town and the cays all day and most of the night.

  Two hundred years earlier, St. Michael’s Cay had been identified as the perfect site for an exclusive boarding school catering for the sons of the French Colonial administrators and wealthy farmers and merchants who had made Prince William Island their home.

  In 1880, the island fell to British rule, but the new administrators carried right on sending their sons to St. Michael’s Boarding School for Boys. In 1914, the school had opened St. Michael’s College for young ladies so that wealthy families would have somewhere safe to send their daughters while the world was at war. The young ladies’ college was carefully situated on the opposite side of a river from the boys.

  Today, it was a coeducational school, but the boys’ and the girls’ boarding houses were still separated by that river.

  It was a beautiful afternoon for a ferry ride. The sea was as still as glass, even once they had cleared the coral reef that guarded the eastern side of the island. Usually, you immediately noticed the choppiness of the water once you were beyond the reef, but today it was hardly perceptible.

  The sun twinkled on the water. Fleur and Eulalie slipped on sunglasses as they stood at the rail watching the cliffs of Prince William Island recede into the distance. The only other craft out on the water was another ferry chugging in the opposite direction.

  “Where is that one going?” Fleur asked, pointing at it.

  Eulalie thought about it. “I think it must be taking tourists out to Monk’s Cay.”