A Meditation on Murder

by Robert Thorogood

  The office phone rang and Richard huffed. ‘No, it’s alright, you two stay where you are, I’ll get it.’

  Richard went to the sun-bleached counter and plucked up the ancient phone’s handset.

  ‘Honoré Police Station, this is Detective Inspector Richard Poole speaking. How can I be of assistance?’

  Richard listened a moment before cupping the phone and turning back to his team.

  ‘Fidel. Phone Camille. Cancel the banana sandwich. There’s been a murder.’

  Rianka had set up The Retreat eighteen years ago when she’d bought a derelict sugar plantation for a knock-down price. The main house had been abandoned for nearly fifty years by this time, but it wasn’t its outside that Rianka found herself responding to, it was the inside. Admittedly, the interior wasn’t much less damaged, but what Rianka noticed was how the rooms were still as beautifully proportioned and airy as they’d always been; the rotten ceilings were just as high; the main staircase, while leaf-swept and missing many of its boards, was just as grand. To Rianka, the house was no less than a metaphor for the island itself—shabby on the outside, but full of soul on the inside—and, within the year, she’d restored the main house and grounds to their former glory and opened for business as a luxury hotel called ‘The Plantation’.

  When Rianka then got together with Aslan, they’d increasingly started to market the hotel as a high-end health farm, and it wasn’t long before they’d relaunched the whole venture as a luxury spa that was now called ‘The Plantation Spa’.

  The business went from strength to strength.

  Then, as Aslan got more involved in exploring the spiritual side of life, he started offering holistic treatments and therapies to hotel guests—either led by him, or by other instructors he hired especially—and it wasn’t long before they’d relaunched the hotel for a third and final time as ‘The Retreat’.

  For a good few years now, the hotel had been specifically tailored to the internationally wealthy who wanted to heal their minds just as much as they wanted to heal their bodies. Guests could sign up for sessions in healing, be it Crystal, Reiki or Sunrise; or yoga, be it Bikram or Hatha; or meditation, be it Zazen or Transcendental.

  Now, as the police drove up the gravel driveway in convoy, their blue lights flashing dimly in the bright Caribbean sunshine, they could see that the main hotel building was the old plantation owner’s house; manicured lawns swept down to a private beach, and there were incongruous quasi-religious buildings dotted here and there around the grounds with hotel guests coming and going from them.

  Richard, Camille and Fidel climbed out of the police Land Rover and Dwayne dismounted from the Force’s only other vehicle, a 1950s Harley-Davidson motorbike that had an entirely illegal sidecar attached to it. No one quite knew where this bike-with-sidecar had come from, or how it had got tricked up in the livery of the Saint-Marie Police Force, but legend had it—and records seemed to confirm—that it had joined the Saint-Marie Police Force just after Dwayne did. Not that Dwayne was saying.

  Dominic came out of the house—still wearing flip-flops and cut-off shorts, but the gravity of the situation was such that he’d deigned to slip on a vest.

  ‘Man, I’m glad to see you,’ he said, running a hand through his lustrous hair before shaking his head a little so his mane would settle.

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Dominic De Vere. The Retreat’s handyman.’

  Dominic was British and Richard could tell from his drawling accent that he was from a moneyed background. In fact, Richard knew the type well. Posh, dim, wealthy, entitled—and therefore able to waft through life exploring the counter-culture as a hobby. No doubt, if Dominic’s money ever ran out, he’d make a phone call to one of his old school chums, land a high-paid job in the City and then, for the rest of his life, complain that ‘the youth of today’ were feckless layabouts.

  It was fair to say that Richard disliked Dominic on sight.

  ‘If you could just take us to the body,’ he said.

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Richard had no interest in continuing the conversation with someone who wore a shark tooth on a string around his neck, so they all walked on in silence until they reached the corner of the house, which is when Dominic stopped and frowned. Richard looked at him.

  ‘Sorry, is there a problem?’ Richard asked.

  It was clear that there was, but Dominic didn’t know where to start.

  ‘Go on,’ Camille said altogether more tolerantly.

  ‘Okay,’ Dominic said. ‘Well, it’s just …’

  As Dominic stopped speaking, he started to waft his hands near Richard’s body.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Richard asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen this before.’

  ‘I’m a police officer, would you stop stroking my arms?’

  ‘But this isn’t possible.’

  This got Richard’s attention. ‘What’s not possible?’

  Dominic exhaled as if he was about to deliver some very bad news.

  ‘You don’t have an aura.’

  Richard looked at Dominic a long moment.

  ‘I know I don’t. Auras don’t exist. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to stay exactly where you are while we go and inspect the body.’

  ‘But your team all have auras.’

  ‘We do?’ Camille said eagerly, holding up her hand for her boss to wait. She wanted to hear this out.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Dominic continued, smiling easily for Camille’s benefit. ‘Yours is yellow, golden … it’s like sunlight. Warm. Impetuous. Open. Sexually adventurous.’

  Camille seemed delighted by this analysis as Dominic held her gaze much longer than he needed to, and Richard found himself noticing that Dominic wasn’t just tanned, muscly and heroically square-jawed, he was also extremely good-looking. In a slightly obvious way of course, Richard found himself adding as an afterthought in his head.

  Dominic next turned his attention to Fidel and considered the air that encompassed him.

  ‘As for you, you’re blues and greens … of kindness … valour. Hard work. Hey, you’re one of the good guys.’

  Fidel blushed. He was clearly just as thrilled with his ‘reading’ as Camille had been with hers.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sakes!’ Richard said. ‘Thank you, Mr De Vere, but I can see that people are congregated over there’—Richard pointed at the Meditation Space as it sat some way away on the lawn—’and I want to make this clear: my colleagues and I are going over to the crime scene right now, and you’re going to stay right here.’

  ‘But what about me?’ Dwayne said, eager as a puppy dog. ‘What’s my aura?’

  Richard huffed in indignation as Dominic turned to Dwayne and took his time to consider. But then a knowing smile slipped onto Dominic’s lips.

  ‘You’re like me. A shape-shifter.’

  Dwayne beamed at what he perceived to be the highest of compliments.

  ‘I knew it.’

  Dominic turned back to Richard. ‘But I’m telling you, when I look at you, I don’t see … anything.’

  ‘Whereas I see a murder scene over there, so thank you very much for your help. Team, you’re with me, but if you try to move even an inch’—Richard said this to Dominic—’I’m going to arrest you for wasting police time.’

  Richard strode off across the lawn, his team trying not to catch each other’s eyes as they got into their boss’s slipstream. After all, it wouldn’t do to turn up at a murder scene giggling.

  But then, there was no chance of Richard or his team laughing by the time they arrived at the Meditation Space, where they found six shell-shocked Brits sitting or standing on the grass. Five of them were wearing white cotton robes that were variously spattered in drying blood. The sixth of them—Rianka—was sitting on the grass on her own. She was wearing a long Indian-style skirt with little mirrors sewn into the hemline, a light summer blouse, and leather sandals.

 
‘Okay, my name’s Detective Inspector Richard Poole,’ Richard said. ‘And this is Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey. Can any of you tell me what happened?’

  ‘That’s simple,’ said a well-tanned man in his fifties with a Yorkshire accent, a thick gold chain just visible around his neck. Richard also had time to notice a chunky gold watch on the man’s wrist. Clearly he was seriously wealthy.

  ‘The name’s Ben Jenkins,’ the man said. ‘And you should know, that woman over there, she says her name’s Julia Higgins. And she’s admitted it all. She killed Aslan Kennedy.’

  Richard could see that Ben was pointing at a young woman in a bloodied white robe who was standing on her own on the grass. She was in her early twenties, had long blonde hair that was tied up in a ponytail, and she was looking back at Richard with doe eyes, seemingly as dismayed by the accusation as everyone else. But she wasn’t denying it, either, Richard noted.

  With a quick nod of his head, Richard indicated that Dwayne should ghost over to Julia and make sure she didn’t make a run for it. As Dwayne started to move, Richard turned back to Ben.

  ‘And where’s the body?’

  ‘In there.’ Ben pointed at the Meditation Space.

  Richard turned to the group. ‘Then if you’d all just wait here, please. The Detective Sergeant and I will only be a moment. Camille?’

  Richard headed over to the Meditation Space, Camille coming over to join him, but Richard found himself stopping at the threshold to the building.

  ‘One moment,’ Richard said as he held his hand up for Camille to pause, because it was only now as Richard approached that he saw that the walls to the building were made of paper. In fact, as he looked closer, he could see that the paper was waxy, clearly very strong, and was even somewhat translucent. Richard put his hand on the other side of the door and noticed that he could still dimly see his hand’s shape through the paper.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Camille asked.

  Richard ignored Camille as he took a moment to inspect the door to the building. He saw that there was no handle on the outside, but there was a Yale-style latch lock on the inside of the door that was screwed deep into the wooden frame—and that there was a corresponding housing on the door frame that it slotted into when the room was locked.

  But without a keyhole on the outside, it appeared as though the door could only be locked and unlocked from the inside. Richard filed this information away for later consideration.

  Stepping into the room, Richard immediately understood why the walls and roof were made of translucent paper, because every inch of the walls glowed with brilliant sunshine. And not only was it brighter inside the room than it was outside, it was significantly hotter too, like being at the heart of a supernova. Which was just bloody typical, Richard thought to himself.

  Camille joined Richard inside and looked at her boss as he prickled in his suit.

  ‘Hot, isn’t it?’ she said, helpfully.

  Richard decided to ignore his partner and instead, squinting against the light, saw that the body of a man lay sticky with blood in the middle of the floor. His hair, beard and white robes were now thick with blood. And there was a bloody knife on the floor by the body.

  Richard gave the room a quick once-over, but there wasn’t much to see. The floor was polished hardwood planks; there were six woven prayer mats arranged in a circle around a tray of tea things. Six pairs of fabric eye masks and six wireless headphones were also lying here and there, but other than that the room was empty. No furniture—no cupboards, tables, chairs, statues or other ornaments—to hide behind or conceal murder weapons in.

  To all intents and purposes the room was entirely bare.

  Richard bent down and picked up one of the wireless headsets. He put it to his ear and frowned.

  ‘What is it?’ Camille asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Richard said, listening, but unable to work out what the noise was.

  It was a strange keening.

  He listened a bit longer, but, as far as he could tell, it was just more of the same yawling noise. And then dread filled his heart as he realised what it was.

  With a shudder, he said, ‘It’s whales singing.’

  Richard lowered the headphones, sharpish, and put them back down on the floor, before he joined Camille at the centre of the room to inspect the victim.

  Crouching down, Richard could see that the murder weapon to the side of the body was a carving knife of some sort. Utterly vicious. The blade was covered in blood, although the handle seemed to be clean.

  ‘We’re going to need to get this bagged and tested for prints,’ Richard said.

  Camille was inspecting the body.

  ‘There are no signs of a struggle … no fabric or skin caught under the victim’s fingernails … and no cuts to the hands, wrists or arms. It doesn’t look like he tried to defend himself from the attack.’

  Richard looked at the tray of tea things on the floor by the pool of blood that had spread from the body. The teapot was willow pattern and there were six bone china cups that had all been turned upside down on the floor, one cup in front of each prayer mat. Richard tried to work out what had happened.

  If the mats and cups were to be believed, there’d been six people in here. They’d all been sitting on the prayer mats around the tray of tea things. They’d all then had a cup of tea and turned their cup over and placed it down on the floor in front of them to show that they’d finished their drink.

  But how did the eye masks and headphones fit into this? And how exactly had the victim been killed?

  Camille inspected the stab wounds in the victim’s back.

  ‘There appear to be five separate sharp force injuries in the victim’s neck, shoulder and back,’ she said. ‘Two wounds on the right side of the neck, and three wounds on the right side of his shoulder and back. I’d say the assailant was standing behind the victim—and was almost certainly right-handed.’

  Richard came over and could see the sense of what Camille was saying. The pattern of wounds suggested that the victim could only have been killed by someone who was standing behind him and striking into his neck and back holding a knife right-handed.

  Richard made himself look at the face of Aslan as it lay in a pool of blood on the floor. Who was this man? What had he done to warrant such a violent death?

  Richard exhaled. This was his job. To start with the end of the story: the body; the murder. And then he had to uncover the evidence that would allow him to wind time back until he could prove—categorically prove—who’d been standing above the body when the victim was killed; who it was that had wielded the knife.

  Richard always made a silent promise to the victims of murder, and he made it once again now: he’d catch their killer. Whatever it took. He wouldn’t rest until the killer was behind bars.

  A flash of light caught Richard’s eye in the far corner of the room. He turned back to look, but the little flash of light had gone as soon as it appeared. So he moved his head a fraction. No, still nothing. He moved his head back. There it was again.

  There was something shiny on the floorboards he hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Camille asked as Richard went over to the wall at the end of the room and got down on his hands and knees to inspect the floor.

  ‘What’s this doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘What is it?’ Camille asked as she came over to join her boss.

  Richard found himself looking at a shiny drawing pin. It was just sitting there loose on the floorboards.

  ‘It’s a drawing pin.’

  ‘And why’s that of interest?’

  ‘Didn’t you see all of the witnesses out there?’ Richard said.

  ‘Of course. What about them?’

  Richard turned to his partner as though he was a magician about to reveal the end of a particularly impressive trick. ‘Because, I’m sure you noticed, Camille, that most of the witnesses were barefoot.’

  Camille was utterly uni
mpressed. ‘So?’

  ‘So who would leave a drawing pin like this loose in a room where people were going about barefoot?’

  Camille waited a moment before answering. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What do you mean, “that’s it”?’ Richard asked, irritated.

  ‘Your big revelation? That there’s a drawing pin at the scene of crime?’

  ‘No, Camille, that’s not what I said.’

  ‘But it is. I just heard you.’

  ‘No you didn’t. You heard me say that it’s loose on the floor. That’s what’s interesting. For example,’ he said, standing up and indicating the rough-hewn wooden pillars and beams that made up the internal structure of the paper house, ‘if I found a drawing pin in one of these wooden pillars, that would be less interesting. It would just mean that someone had pinned something to a pillar. But here?’ Richard pointed at the drawing pin as it sat blamelessly on the polished hardwood floor. ‘How did it get there? Who dropped it?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Camille said, deadpan. ‘We’ve got a dead body over there that’s covered in knife wounds, so let’s concentrate on a tiny piece of metal we’ve found on the floor over here. In fact, I think you’re right! What if the carving knife we found by the body is a double bluff and the killer used this tiny drawing pin to stab the victim to death?’

  Richard decided to ignore his subordinate entirely. Without another word, he went outside again, pulling his hankie as he went and mopping his brow. Really, he thought to himself, his life on Saint-Marie was blighted by bloody sunshine. His shirt collar chafed at his neck; the dark wool of his suit trousers stretched hot and tight across his thighs; and his suit jacket pressed heavy and scorching against his shoulders and back. Wearing a suit in the Caribbean was like living inside a bloody Corby trouser press. But what could he do? He had to wear a woollen suit. He was a Detective Inspector. And Detective Inspectors wore dark woollen suits, that’s just how it was.

  Richard saw that an ambulance had arrived over by the main house and paramedics were getting out a gurney.

  ‘Very well, Camille,’ he said. ‘While I talk to our apparent murderer, I want you to take the remaining witnesses off. And I want you to get the paramedics to take samples of the witnesses’ blood and urine.’