A Meditation on Murder

by Robert Thorogood

  Ann looked at Richard as though he’d just betrayed her.

  ‘But it’s just like I told you. I did the washing up and put it away the night before. That’s the last time I ever touched one of those knives.’

  ‘Even though you’d never done the washing up on any of the previous nights you’d been here?’

  ‘Even so,’ Ann said, darkly. ‘Because there’s something else you’re forgetting. How can I be the killer? It was a man in Aslan’s office the night before shouting at him that he wouldn’t get away with it, wasn’t it? Which makes me ask, was that you, Paul?’

  Paul wasn’t having any of this. ‘As well you know, I was with you on the beach,’ he said.

  ‘You know,’ Ann said to the police, ‘I didn’t say at the time, but I can’t guarantee that Paul was with me the whole time. Not really.’

  ‘Oh?’ Richard said, pretending that this was news to him, but he well remembered his first interview with the witnesses and the fact that Ann had seemed puzzled when Paul had said that his wife could alibi him for the whole afternoon.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ann continued. ‘Because every afternoon here, I’ve had a nap on the sunloungers after my afternoon swim—and the day before Aslan was killed was no exception.’

  ‘Stop talking rot,’ Paul said. ‘I was with you the whole time.’

  ‘But that’s what I’m saying. I was asleep on my sunlounger for at least an hour—at about 6pm—that’s when I’ve been having a doze every afternoon since we’ve got here. So if there was a man who was heard shouting at Aslan in his office at that time, it could have been Paul.’

  ‘You know,’ Paul said smoothly to his wife, ‘you really should have mentioned this before. Now it just looks like sour grapes.’

  Ann turned her back on her husband as she said, ‘But if you want me to, I’ll admit it. I hated David Kennedy. Not because of the money he stole from me. Not really. But because of what I was doing with that money. And losing it meant I never got to follow my heart. But please believe me, I had no idea that the man running this hotel was him.’ Richard looked at the two suspects and didn’t even know where to begin. Because Paul was right, there’s no way he would kill Aslan to revenge his wife. Not unless he was lying about his relationship with Ann, and that hardly seemed possible, did it? The animosity he was showing towards her was too real. Altogether too keen. And as for Ann, Richard could well imagine her recognising Aslan as David from the flyers—just as Paul now admitted he did—but if she were the killer, then why on earth did she allow her fingerprints to be found on the handle of the murder weapon?

  Richard once again found himself feeling manipulated. What was he missing? Who was the killer?

  Was it in fact Ann trying to get revenge on the man who’d stolen her future from her?

  Or was it Paul who killed Aslan—either because he loved his wife after all and was wreaking revenge on her behalf? Or maybe because he hated her and was now trying to frame his wife for the murder? But that didn’t seem possible, either. If you hate your wife, Richard found himself thinking, you divorce her, you don’t commit murder to get her locked up.

  Then maybe it was Saskia Filbee—because of the million pounds she lost to Aslan and the lawyers? But if she was the killer, how did she arrange it, seeing as she only arrived on the island the night before the murder—and after the list of names had been published for the Sunrise Meditation?

  And then—finally—was it Ben, for reasons still unknown? After all, if he wasn’t the killer, why on earth had he run away?

  And who was the man who’d been threatening Aslan that he wouldn’t get away with it the night before he was killed?

  Richard realised that the whole case was at risk of unravelling, but, in truth, he didn’t have even the first idea how much worse things were about to get.

  Within the next twenty-four hours, the killer would strike again.

  Chapter Eleven

  In truth, the police knew that if Ben really wanted to put his mind to leaving Saint-Marie, there’d be little they could do to stop him. A few hundred dollars to a local boat captain and you could be on either of the neighbouring islands of Guadeloupe or Martinique in a couple of hours.

  But the police had to carry on as though they’d be able to find him, and the fact that they had his passport in custody was their one sliver of hope. Without his passport, it would be that bit harder for Ben to vanish.

  That evening, Richard was in his shack and somewhat edgy. The rain that had been promised during the day had duly arrived as Richard had sat down to eat his tea of poached eggs on toast. He’d had to sit inside and mournfully push the watery eggs and floppy white toast around his plate while whole sheets of rain swept across his beach, unable to think over the thunderous clatter of rain on his tin roof. And then, the very moment that Richard had finished his eggs on toast, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out to boil him again.

  Having done the washing up, swept the floor of sand, had his early evening shower, swept the floor again, got into his pyjamas and then decided that the floor needed a quick sweep, Richard had since been checking through the photos he’d taken of the chemicals and cleaning products they’d found in Dominic’s house.

  After all, just because Paul Sellars had a heap of Xyrax pills in his hotel room, it didn’t mean that it was Paul’s stock of Xyrax that had been used to drug the witnesses. What if Dominic also had the ingredients to make GHB in his lab? What’s more, thirty seconds of research on the internet had shown that Richard’s first instincts had been right: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid could easily be manufactured in a home lab. All Dominic would have needed was some butyrolactone, some sodium hydroxide, tap water, pH paper, and basic knowledge of GCSE chemistry. Dominic definitely had the chemistry knowledge—and the ability to make sodium hydroxide—but did he have the necessary butyrolactone in his lab?

  For the last few hours, then, Richard had been identifying each cleaning product or chemical he’d photographed in Dominic’s lab, looking up its active ingredients on the internet, and then trying to work out whether that chemical could then be used to synthesise the butyrolactone Dominic would have needed to create GHB.

  As Richard kept checking the ingredients in the photos he’d taken of the chemicals and cleaning products, he also found his mind wandering over Dominic’s role in the case. After all, Dominic was the only person who’d not got on with Aslan—Aslan had even recently sacked him—and Dominic had also kept his relationship with Julia a secret. What’s more, could Dominic really be believed when he said that someone had burgled his chemistry lab the week before the murder? What was Dominic really up to?

  Mind you, Richard had to concede, Dominic had never been inside the Meditation Space, so, if he were the killer, how on earth could he have done it?

  It was boring work, and it didn’t help that although it was nearly ten o’clock, it was still boiling hot. Richard had got all of the windows open, the old French doors were thrown open wide, but there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze. It was one of those humid, still, tropical nights when the sweat would sit proud on Richard’s skin and he knew he’d barely get any sleep. The only small mercy was that Harry the Lizard didn’t seem to be anywhere, so at least Richard didn’t have to come face to face with the physical embodiment of his lily-livered inability to act decisively.

  And that’s when he found it.

  At first, the photo had seemed just as innocuous as all the others he had been looking at. The picture showed a spray-bottle cleaning product called ‘Wheel & Rim Cleaner’ that had a photo of a sparkling car wheel on the front of it. The blurb on the bottle said, ‘Guaranteed to remove 100% of all rust!’.

  But it was when Richard looked at the next photo on his phone—which showed the bottle’s active ingredients—that he realised he’d hit pay dirt. The cleaning product was listed as being 99.9% pure butyrolactone—which Richard knew was the last remaining ingredient Dominic would have needed to make gamma-hydroxybutyric acid in his ho
me lab.

  Which rather complicated matters, because Richard now had to consider: did the GHB that was used to sedate the suspects come from Paul’s supply of stolen Xyrax? Or did it come from Dominic’s home lab?

  Richard’s reverie was interrupted when he heard someone outside, and he looked up in surprise.

  Julia Higgins was standing on his verandah.

  It took Richard a few moments to process this information and then he jumped to his feet, nearly knocking his smartphone to the floor as he did so.

  ‘Oh! Hello. Julia. What a surprise. Sorry you find me like this.’ Richard indicated his Marks and Spencer pyjamas, very sensibly striped with alternating bands of dark blue and maroon.

  ‘Wow,’ Julia said in wonder. ‘This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.’

  Richard looked about himself and wondered what on earth Julia was talking about. Thanks to a quick ‘once-round’ with the broom only a few minutes before, the floorboards were at least mercifully clear of sand, but the furniture was so dilapidated that Richard had always presumed the place had been furnished from a charity shop’s closing down sale—and, now that he was looking, Richard found himself once again remembering that he really should hire a skip to get rid of all of the tat that the previous owner, D.I. Charlie Hulme, had left behind.

  ‘It is?’ Richard replied, somewhat surprised.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Julia stepped into the light of the room and Richard finally got to see that she was wearing what was frankly an indecently tiny dress. Made of the local madras—a bright yellow, green and red gingham—Richard realised there was probably more material in one of his favourite hankies, and as his eyes were drawn to Julia’s tanned legs, Richard noticed in a panic that she was barefoot.

  ‘Sorry, only I’ve only just swept the floor, would you mind not bringing any sand …’

  But Julia didn’t hear Richard’s words as she stepped over to the old sideboard, reached up on tiptoes and pulled down a carved onyx head from the top of an old dresser.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  The carving was of a traditional Arawak tribal elder.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Richard said, still panicking at the trail of sand Julia had left behind on the floor.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Richard tried to look at the onyx head, but there were two problems with this. Firstly, it was a carved onyx head—why on earth would you look at one of those?—and, secondly, there was sand on the floor.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Richard said, bustling over to the far wall, yanking his Dustbuster from its charging station and turning it on—at which point it started to emit a very loud and high-pitched drone. Getting down on his hands and knees, Richard stabbed at the sandy footprints Julia had left on the floorboards.

  ‘You’d be amazed at how useful these things are,’ Richard called out over the banshee wail. ‘There’s almost no space it can’t get into. There we are. That’s better.’

  Richard stood back up, pleased that he’d managed to restore order to his world. He then returned to the docking station and clunked the little vacuum cleaner back into place. Only then did he realise he’d maybe spoiled the mood of intimacy.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said with a conversational tone he certainly wasn’t feeling. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’

  Richard didn’t really understand the question.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’

  Richard was still flummoxed. ‘Where?’

  Now it was Julia’s turn to be taken aback.

  ‘Along the beach.’

  ‘You mean … outside?’ Richard was appalled at the thought, and then he indicated that he was only wearing pyjamas—while saying as breezily as he could, ‘Unfortunately, I’m not really dressed for a night-time ramble.’

  ‘Come on,’ Julia said. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening, I want to look at the stars.’

  And so it was that Richard found himself walking in his pyjamas and tan leatherette slippers across a white sand beach with a beautiful young woman who, by her own confession, wanted to go for a walk with him and look at the stars.

  ‘So …’ Richard said as a way of trying to find out what on earth was going on. After all, he couldn’t help but notice that the person he was talking to—in the middle of the night—had recently been in a prison cell because he’d arrested her on suspicion of murder.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ Julia said, looking up at the riotous sweep of stars that filled every inch of the sky.

  Richard looked up at the night sky.

  Very little in life held Richard spellbound in wonder—and stars were no exception. As far as he was concerned, they were just great big balls of gas that were a very long way away. But he had to admit to himself that he’d always liked looking at them, if only because they reminded him that the universe was ever-expanding—or at least was expanding for the moment—and one day, many thousands of aeons after he’d died, the whole thing would collapse back in on itself until everything that had ever existed was crushed down into a ball of almost infinitely small size.

  The actual pointless futility of existence somehow made coping with its apparent pointless futility more manageable, he found.

  Richard glanced at Julia and could see that she was now looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read. It wasn’t irritation—Richard knew how to decode that one well enough—or disappointment, or frustration. So what was it?

  ‘I just wanted to thank you.’

  ‘Ah. Right. And why would that be?’ Richard asked, still none the wiser.

  ‘You never thought I’d killed him. Did you?’

  This wasn’t strictly true of course, but Richard had an instinct that now was not the time to get bogged down in the minutiae of the case. Even so, he couldn’t let her believe a lie.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he said as breezily as he could, ‘but I knew we hadn’t got the full story. After all, you never seemed to know how you’d done it. Or where the knife had come from. Or why you’d done it, really. And then there’s the fact that the wounds were inflicted by someone right-handed, which we knew you weren’t …’

  Richard stopped speaking as he realised that he was in fact getting bogged down in the minutiae of the case.

  Julia smiled and pointed at a little tower of smooth pebbles further along the beach.

  ‘Oh look,’ she said, ‘a wishing tower.’

  There was a local custom on Saint-Marie that if you wanted a wish to come true, you first collected a cluster of flat pebbles and made a tower out of them. You then made a wish, and if the spirits of the island willed it, your wish would come true. The tower which had been built a little way off along the beach was a pretty typical example, about a foot high.

  As far as Richard was concerned, the whole custom of littering beaches with towers of stones was a health and safety nightmare—and whenever he saw any soupy-eyed youngster constructing one, he always wished he could make an arrest based on the criminal offence of whimsy.

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said, unable to keep a note of disapproval out of his voice, ‘I saw Dominic had a similar wishing tower in his house.’

  At the sound of Dominic’s name, Julia sighed.

  ‘I should tell you,’ Julia said. ‘I broke up with Dominic.’

  Richard looked at her a long moment and then gave a quick shrug to indicate that he didn’t really understand what this fact meant.

  ‘Weeks ago. In my mind. I just hadn’t told him. Or me for that matter. I still didn’t know. But I knew, if you know what I mean. You know?’

  Richard didn’t of course, so he very carefully shook his head side to side in a nodding-in-agreement kind of a way.

  ‘And being in that prison cell, I began to realise. I only came out here for a holiday. What was I still doing on the island? Dominic was never going to be long-term, being here was never going to be long
-term. I was just … I think, if I’m honest, I was just running away.’

  ‘What from?’

  ‘The future.’

  Oh god, Richard found himself thinking to himself, here we go again. ‘The future?’

  ‘You know,’ Julia said, for once being entirely straightforward. ‘Getting a job. Using my degree. Because … all this?’ Julia indicated the beach and the sea. ‘This can’t be long-term.’

  She turned back to Richard. ‘I’m going back to the UK. Just as soon as I can.’

  ‘Which is obviously once the murder investigation concludes,’ Richard pointed out, as lightly as he could.

  ‘Of course. That sea looks so inviting.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Julia took a few steps into the sea and let the water gently lap at her bare feet. Richard was, of course standing a yard or two further up the negligible slope of the beach. It was bad enough being out on the sand in his slippers, but he couldn’t risk them getting wet or salt-damaged in any way.

  ‘The sea. Don’t you just want to dive in?’

  Richard took a tentative step nearer to the water’s edge and indicated the expanse of sea as it glistened in the moonlight.

  ‘But there are sharks out there,’ he explained.

  Julia looked at Richard. ‘Of course. But they’re out there.’

  Julia pointed further out to sea and Richard was once again struck by the collective insanity that seemed to grip otherwise rational humans when they declared a view of the sea beautiful even though it must, perforce, contain a quantity of sharks. Hadn’t they realised? Sharks were like German U-boats. They could be anywhere.