Dominic looked back at Richard, and it was clear that he was worried.
Richard turned back to the room. ‘But putting Dominic to one side for a moment, everyone else adored Aslan. For his pure soul. His kindness. So let’s see where the balance of evidence lies. If dozens of people are saying that Aslan was an innocent who no longer cared for money, why should we believe the one person, Ben, who’s saying that Aslan confessed to being on the con—in a conversation, I hasten to add, that quite conveniently no one else overheard. And Ben’s a one-time violent criminal. Why should we believe what he told us?’
‘Are you saying I lied to you?’ Ben said with a barely concealed hint of menace. ‘Because I’m telling you, Aslan told me he was still on the con.’
Richard looked at Ben a moment. ‘You’re really not prepared to change your story?’
‘No way,’ Ben said. ‘It’s what happened.’
‘Very well. But everyone should bear in mind that there was only ever one person who said Aslan was back to being a crook. So now let’s look at the day of the murder.
‘Aslan Kennedy locks himself inside a wood and paper structure with five other people. The door’s not opened at any time, but when it’s unlocked twenty minutes later, Aslan is dead. So who killed him?
‘Well, let’s see what we know. The tea was drugged with a mild sedative to make everyone docile and less responsive. So that when everyone started to drift off, they really drifted off. As you all know. You were all a touch woozy when you woke up, weren’t you?’
Richard could see that Paul, Ann, Saskia and Ben all agreed with his assessment of the situation.
‘Except for the fact,’ Richard clarified, ‘the killer no doubt took their dose of sedative-laden tea after they’d committed murder. After all, you wouldn’t want to knife someone to death while drugged up, would you?’ Richard held the four suspects’ attention for a moment, before continuing. ‘And as for the knife that was used to kill Aslan? Well, it was obvious from the drawing pins we found at the scene of the crime that the killer had previously set the knife behind a pillar and was able to get to it while the rest of you were lying down wearing eye masks and headphones.
‘And yet, none of what I’ve just said is in any way true. The killer didn’t take their dose of sedative-laden tea after they’d committed murder. And that’s not how the knife was hidden in the room before the murder.’
This got everyone’s attention.
‘Come on,’ Dominic interrupted, ‘just tell us who did it.’
‘Very well,’ Richard said. ‘Because now we come to the only four people who could ever have killed Aslan. The people who were inside the room with him when it was locked down.’ Here Richard looked at Saskia, Ben, Paul and Ann. ‘And because Aslan had stolen from three of you in the past—and the fourth of you was in prison with him—it’s easy to imagine you all having motives.
‘Starting with you, Saskia, you lost the most to Aslan in the Ponzi scam twenty years ago. By some distance. Half a million, up front, and that alone would be enough to commit murder. But that’s not what interested me. Because I was always much more impressed with the half a million you then spent trying to get that first half a million back. Which shows how you don’t forgive. Or forget. What’s more, it made it quite clear—to me at least—that you were prepared to risk everything to get back what you felt was yours. Even though you’ve always made sure you came across to us as demure. Timid, even. But that can’t be the whole story. A timid person wouldn’t have pursued their lost money for so long—and to such a ruinous extent.’
Everyone could see that Saskia was looking anxious at Richard’s words.
‘You don’t understand,’ she tried to say.
‘I understand too well,’ Richard cut back. ‘So don’t even think about denying it. Underneath your quiet exterior—your prim secretarial exterior—you’re prepared to go to the ends of the earth to get revenge. Aren’t you?’
Saskia didn’t dare say anything.
‘But did you do it?’ Richard continued. ‘That’s the question. After all, you only arrived on the island the night before Aslan was killed. So even if you’d already worked out that Aslan was David Kennedy, I don’t see how you could have staged such a complex murder by 8am the following morning.’
‘You don’t think I did it?’ Saskia asked, hope desperately flashing into her eyes.
Richard looked at Saskia. ‘That’s right. I don’t.’
Saskia gulped. And then frowned. And then bobbed her head in appreciation to Richard. For his part, Richard next turned to Ben Jenkins.
‘So let’s look at you, Ben Jenkins,’ Richard said. ‘Because Aslan’s murder was so violent, surely we needed look no further than the only person here who already had a history of violent crime to unmask our murderer?’
‘I served my time,’ Ben said with the sort of edge that suggested he hadn’t quite put his violent past as far behind him as he’d have liked people to believe.
‘But you’re still consorting with other criminals. As your friendship with the ex-con Ratty proves.’
‘I told you all about him voluntarily.’
‘Hardly,’ Richard said. ‘You were trying to make sure you didn’t get arrested for murder at the time. I think you were throwing us a bone to distract us. Just as I think you were trying to distract us when you told us that Aslan confessed to you that he was on the con again.’
‘But that’s what he told me!’ Ben said, no longer able to keep the anger out of his voice.
Richard tilted his head to one side as though he were an art expert deciding if a painting was fake or not. ‘Again. Interesting.’
Richard turned back to address the room. ‘It was also true that you were the person in the murder room who’d known Aslan’s true identity the longest. In fact, you’d worked out that Aslan was David a whole three months before he died, as you were forced to admit when you showed us your email correspondence with him. Which, I can’t help noticing, was weeks and weeks before Aslan decided to invite all the Ponzi victims out to the Caribbean—a stark change in his policy. Was it you who told him to invite Paul, Ann and Saskia out here all at the same time?’
‘But you saw my emails to him!’ Ben said. ‘I tried to make contact, but his emails kept bouncing back to me.’
Richard replied darkly, ‘There are ways of communicating other than via email, Ben. And seeing as you knew you’d eventually have to explain to us how you ended up on Saint-Marie, perhaps you created the email trail to Aslan to give yourself a plausible cover story.’
‘This doesn’t even remotely stack up,’ Ben said.
‘A man with a violent past who’s known Aslan’s real identity for long enough to dupe the victim into inviting the others out here—and who’s the only person on the whole island who’s been saying that the victim was still up to no good? It sure looks to me like you’re our most likely suspect.’
‘But why did I want him dead?’ Ben asked through gritted teeth.
Richard held Ben’s gaze a long moment.
‘And there you have me,’ Richard conceded. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with your time you spent in prison with Aslan? Or the confidence trick he’s now apparently trying to pull off?’
Richard was looking hard at Ben to see if a moment of fear would slip into his eyes like had happened before.
It didn’t.
‘And that’s the thing. Because you’re right. Although you’d have been the most likely person to carry out a violent crime like this, I’ve never been able to uncover a single reason why you’d want Aslan dead. So, I don’t see how you could be the killer.’
‘You don’t?’ Ben asked, somewhat stunned by Richard’s sudden change of direction.
‘That’s right. I don’t think you killed Aslan Kennedy.’
This took a moment to register with Ben, and then he briefly threw his hands up in the air with a sudden exhalation of contempt, for the police in general—and Richard in particular.
All the colour had already drained from Paul’s face, but Richard could see that Ann was trying to look composed.
She was failing. Very well. So be it.
‘Because here we have a couple,’ Richard said, ‘who quite clearly don’t get on. And one of them, Paul, stole a bottle of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid—trade name, Xyrax—that we now know was used to sedate the witnesses just before the murder was carried out. What’s more, Paul had even secretly been phoning Aslan from his office phone—apparently behind his wife’s back. And, as Paul was eventually forced to admit, he’d recognised that Aslan was David the moment he saw his face in the hotel’s leaflet.’
‘Now look here,’ Paul started.
‘No, you look here, Paul,’ Richard said, ‘because you should know that I don’t think you killed Aslan Kennedy.’
‘You don’t?’ Paul said, almost deathly pale by now.
‘As it happens, no,’ Richard said. ‘Even though it was undoubtedly your Xyrax that the real killer used to lace the tea you all drank that morning.’
At different speeds, everyone in the room realised what this must mean. They all turned and looked at Ann, who was standing stock still. Like a suspect about to receive their sentence, Richard found himself thinking.
‘Why are you all looking at me like that?’ Ann asked.
‘Because,’ Richard said, ‘only someone locked in the Meditation Space with Aslan could have killed him, and it wasn’t Julia, Saskia, Ben or your husband. So, by a simple process of elimination, that leaves only you. Good-time Ann. Who wears wild clothes—obviously has a good laugh wherever she goes—if only as an antidote to living with her turgid husband. And yet, let’s stop and think what these last twenty years must have been like for you. Because, as you eventually had to admit to us, you once had a dream. A dream you were realising when you were studying to be a singer. And that’s what shattered when Aslan stole the twenty thousand pounds you’d set aside to pay for your fees.’
‘I didn’t kill him!’ Ann said, horrified.
‘You didn’t?’
‘No!’
Richard looked at Ann a long moment, and then his face softened.
‘I know,’ he said.
This got a reaction from the witnesses.
‘You mean,’ Ann asked, ‘you don’t think I killed Aslan Kennedy?’
‘That’s right,’ Richard said, quite unperturbed, as he turned back to look at Ben, Saskia, Paul and Ann. ‘But I want you to know the process of elimination that led me to understand how Aslan was really killed. Because it had to be one of you who killed him and yet I never could quite make it fit. It was as though I had lots of different jigsaw pieces, but they all belonged to different puzzles. And I was right. That’s how the murder was made to look.
‘We had Ben, who was the most violent of you, but it was only Julia and Ann whose fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. And as for Julia, she confessed to the murder, but was left-handed and therefore couldn’t have carried it out. Whereas you, Saskia, always had the best motive, but you only arrived on the island the night before. And Paul seemed to have no motive at all. But then, it was Paul’s drugs that were used in the tea—I know that now. And it was Ben who’d been in touch with Aslan the longest. Each one of you had something incriminating about you, but you also seemed to have something else that suggested you couldn’t have done it. It was almost as if you’d taken all of the necessary elements of a single murder and shared them out among yourselves. And it was only when I realised this that I managed to make a connection that I maybe should have made much, much sooner.
‘You see, other than Aslan, there were five people in the murder room when he was killed. And there were five knife strikes in his neck and back. And that’s when it occurred to me.
‘What if you were all in this together? After all, I’d been trying to work out how and when the killer had managed to drink down the drugged tea without being seen. And how the killer managed to lace the tea with gamma-hydroxybutyric acid without being seen. And how the killer smuggled the knife into the Meditation Space without being seen. And—finally!—how the killer managed to kill Aslan without any of the rest of you noticing. One explanation for how all this was achieved would be that the murder wasn’t carried out secretly at all. Remember: five people. Five knife strikes. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?’
Richard took a moment to see that Ben, Saskia, Paul and Ann were all looking increasingly worried—exchanging panicked glances—and Richard watched Ben wipe some sweat from his brow.
‘And it wasn’t a coincidence. Because when I started to think of the five of you working together, the murder finally started to make sense. This was it! How Aslan was killed! It was the only way!
‘Or so I thought until I remembered the drawing pins. Because if you were all in on this together, there’d have been no need to pin the murder weapon behind this pillar here.’
As Richard had been speaking, he’d moved over to the far corner of the Meditation Space and now he indicated the pillar that he and Camille had found the drawing pin stuck into.
‘So why did we find a drawing pin stuck into this wooden pillar here?’ Richard next indicated where they’d found the second and third drawing pins on the floor. ‘In fact, why did we find a second drawing pin on the floor just here? And another one over there? And, above all else, why did we find a fourth drawing pin in the cellar under the main hotel? And to answer that, we have to address the one aspect of this case that has irritated me more than any other. Just why was Aslan killed inside a Japanese tea house? And that’s when I finally understood: although it wasn’t a coincidence that there were five knife strikes, this wasn’t the five of you working together. This was indeed a solo murderer. Someone who’d been manipulating us from the start. A shadowy figure we’d never properly considered.’
As Richard finished talking, everyone realised that he was now looking squarely at Dominic De Vere.
After a long moment, Richard said, ‘And this is where I owe you an apology, Dominic, because you unwittingly revealed the killer to me a long time ago. And I didn’t believe you.’
Richard turned back to Rianka. ‘Because it was you, Rianka, wasn’t it? It was you who killed Aslan Kennedy and then killed Julia Higgins.’
‘What?’ Rianka said, stunned.
Behind her, Dwayne and Camille took half a step forward so that they were now flanking Rianka on either side.
Ben was the first to find his voice.
‘But how can that be? She was outside the Meditation Space when I opened the door.’
‘I know,’ Richard said entirely unfussed.
‘And none of us let her in while we were inside,’ Ann said, just as amazed.
‘I know,’ Richard said. Again, entirely untroubled. ‘But that’s how clever she was.’
‘But you don’t understand,’ Paul said, wanting to make his point clear. ‘There’s no way Rianka could have been hiding inside this room before we locked it down. I mean, look about you, man!’ Here, Paul indicated the completely empty paper box they were all standing in. ‘There’s nowhere to hide.’
‘And that’s where you’re wrong, Ben, because she was hiding in this room before you got in here.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ Ann said. ‘This is a completely empty room.’
‘Precisely!’ Richard almost bounced on his feet as he said this. ‘And seeing as all along I’ve been trying to work out why you’d kill someone inside a Japanese tea house, it is entirely gratifying to discover that I was on the right track. After all, as I kept on asking myself, why not kill Aslan in his bedroom? Or in his office? Why on earth would you choose to commit a murder in a building that was no more than a wooden frame covered in paper? There had to be a reason. And there was.
‘It wasn’t that it was possible to break in fr
om the outside. The rusting staples around the outside of the Meditation Space make it clear that the paper walls have been in place for months. And anyway, any attempt to break in through the paper would have involved cutting a hole large enough to climb through. And seeing as we found no cuts in the paper, that rules that option out. To all intents and purposes, although the tea house is only made of wood and paper, it might just as well have been constructed from brick or stone. It’s impregnable.’ Richard pointed at the latch lock on the door, ‘and the moment Aslan locked the only door into the room, that ruled out anyone getting in from outside. So how was it done? Fidel?’ Richard called out. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Fidel said from outside the building.
The door opened, Fidel entered, and under his arm he had one of the rolls of paper that Camille had found in the cellar underneath the hotel. Although it looked cumbersome, Fidel was able to get the long roll of white paper into the room by bending it around the door—and he brought it over to where Richard was standing by the far wall.
‘You see,’ Richard said, ‘my mistake was to keep looking at the outside walls. Because there’s something about paper that makes it very different from any other kind of building material. And that’s that you can put up an internal paper wall in minutes, and remove it just as quickly. Particularly when you’ve already got a ready-made frame to pin the paper to.’
As Richard said this, he indicated the wooden pillar towards the end of the room that he’d found the drawing pin stuck into.
‘You’ll notice that this pillar is only a couple of feet in from the end wall, and it runs vertically up to the ceiling’—Richard pointed up the pillar as he said this—’where it meets the horizontal beam that goes across the room’—here Richard walked along the width of the room indicating the ceiling beam above his head—’where it meets another vertical pillar which, like the first, is set only a couple of feet into the room.’
A Meditation on Murder Page 26
