A Meditation on Murder

by Robert Thorogood

  ‘As it happened, no one saw Rianka leave, and this allowed her to take the folded-up paper to the cellar under the house and burn it in the hotel’s furnace. In the process, she dropped one of the drawing pins she’d used. A small clue perhaps, but it was enough to make me realise that the killer had possibly been in the cellar under the house. And that’s what made me ask Fidel here to sift through the ash of the furnace—a furnace, I now remember,’ Richard said, turning to Rianka, ‘that you didn’t want us to shut down. Of course you didn’t, you guessed we might find charred bits of paper from the spare roll of paper you’d burnt on the morning of the murder. Not that we knew the importance of what we were doing from your manner. I almost take my hat off to you. You’ve had us turning this way and that from the start.’

  Richard turned back to address the room.

  ‘But having killed her husband—and burnt the roll of paper in the furnace—Rianka then went out onto the verandah and started darning a sock so that later on—when we asked—she’d be able to give false testimony that the whole time Aslan had been inside the Meditation Space, she saw no one enter or leave; another way of making it look as though the killer had to be one of the people who’d been locked inside the room with her husband.

  ‘And this is where Rianka had a stroke of good fortune, because Julia was the first to come round from the drugged tea, and, in her confusion, she went to the body and picked up the knife while she was still groggy. And being the somewhat impressionable and credulous young woman that we all know she was, she erroneously came to the conclusion that she must have killed him.

  ‘Although I’m not sure you necessarily saw it as good fortune. After all, Julia had written out the list of names on your say-so. And you didn’t want us finding that information out until you’d decided it was time to commit murder again.’

  This got everyone’s attention.

  ‘That’s right. I think Rianka was always prepared to commit a second murder if she had to. Whether it would be Julia she killed—or one of the others who’d been locked up with Aslan—I don’t think she yet knew, but she was always prepared for the possibility. And I know this because it was Rianka who broke into Dominic’s house long before Aslan had even been killed, wasn’t it?’

  ‘But why would I do that?’ Rianka asked, finally finding her voice.

  ‘Because you wanted a bottle with Dominic’s fingerprints on. Remember, we know your modus operandi now. You sew confusion by implicating others—indiscriminately—and you don’t care who goes down for your crimes as long as it isn’t you. So yes, it was you who stole Dominic’s bottle—the autopsy report will show whether you also stole some of his poisons as well—and it was you who killed Julia with a drink she no doubt received from you without even the first hint of suspicion that it was laced with poison. But tell me, Rianka, did you return the notebook to its nail for us to find before you’d killed Julia? Or after?’

  Rianka was looking at Richard, but she wasn’t saying.

  Richard wasn’t that bothered as he continued, ‘Either way, you knew that when we analysed the notebook we’d find the indentations of Julia’s handwritten list on it. And, seeing as Julia had already been found standing over the dead body with the murder weapon in her hand, you knew we’d jump to the only logical conclusion: Julia was the killer. And when we found her body, you hoped we’d think she’d killed herself out of guilt.’

  ‘These are all lies!’ Rianka said, a desperate edge to her voice. ‘It was Julia who killed my husband. She killed my husband, and then she killed herself!’

  ‘Hey!’ Dwayne said to Rianka’s side. ‘Save it for the jury.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Richard agreed. ‘But you should know, I already have enough evidence to convict you for the murder of your husband, but I’m not going to rest until you’re also convicted for the murder of Julia Higgins as well. Do you understand?’

  Richard looked at Rianka with an intensity that was frightening. But she had to know. She was going down for both murders; not just for one.

  ‘But I don’t understand!’ Ann interjected, unable to keep silent any longer. ‘Why did she do it? Why did she kill her husband?’

  Richard turned to look at the witnesses, and sighed.

  ‘Ben, you heard in Portugal from your old mate Ratty that Aslan was on the con again. But how could this be? Everyone said how Aslan wasn’t interested in money any more. And his bank account confirmed as much. But tell me: when you confronted Aslan, he was shocked at first, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ben said.

  ‘In fact, he denied being on the con, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He denied it a lot.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ben still agreed.

  ‘And then there came a moment when he changed his mind and seemed to accept what you were saying?’

  ‘That’s it exactly. It was like he didn’t want to disagree with me any more.’

  ‘And here’s what I take from that. Ratty was right when he said that David Kennedy’s off-shore accounts were up and running again, but he was wrong about who was using them. It wasn’t David. It was Rianka.’ Richard was looking at Rianka as he said this, and he could see that the blow had landed.

  Richard turned back to Ben. ‘So, to you, Ben, Aslan denied being on the con right up until the moment he realised that maybe it was Rianka who’d been accessing his old off-shore accounts. At which point, Aslan changed his story and agreed with you. Partly from a tragically misplaced sense of loyalty to his wife, but also because it closed the conversation down with you. He had to go and see his wife at once and find out if she’d been up to anything.’

  ‘And what had she been up to?’ Ann asked, all agog.

  Here, Richard held everyone’s attention a moment before answering.

  ‘Money laundering,’ he then said.

  There was a gasp—a sudden intake of breath—and Richard was pleased to see that it had come from Rianka.

  Richard turned to Dominic. ‘And this is the apology I mentioned earlier that I owe you, Dominic. Because it was you who told us that Aslan and Rianka didn’t get on as well as everyone suggested. In fact, they argued. That’s what you told me. And I should have listened.’ Here, Richard turned to look at Rianka. ‘But what did they argue about? That’s the question.

  ‘I think the answer’s in the very fabric of this place. Because you, Rianka, live in luxury inside a beautiful mansion. Admittedly, it’s also your place of work, but there’s no getting away from it. You surround yourself with the finest imported furniture—the best quality food—the best health and spa treatments—and the most immaculate grounds. But then, your insatiable taste for luxury was surely what first attracted you to the conman, David Kennedy. The fast cars. The hotel suites. Just as you told us.

  ‘When Aslan came and found you out here after he’d served his time in prison, it had all gone well. At first. Yes, he was more spiritual than he’d been before, but that seemed only to benefit the business, and I think you were genuinely happy together. But the thing is, Aslan really had changed. And he didn’t stop changing. In fact, as the years passed and you became more and more obsessed with leading a life of luxury, he became all the more ascetic. He started wearing simple robes; growing a beard and long hair; living by ever-more simple values. He didn’t even want money any more—and what he didn’t spend he gave away.

  ‘And now I find myself remembering that Dominic also said that Aslan was stubborn. I bet he didn’t hold back from telling you that you were living your life by the wrong values. I think that that’s why the pair of you had been arguing.

  ‘Maybe a different person would have reacted differently, but what I don’t think Aslan quite appreciated was the fact that you’d never forgotten that there was a time—twenty years ago—when your husband had been so obsessed with luxury and fast living that he’d stolen money from hundreds of innocent people. And here he was hypocritically lecturing you on morals? How that must have grated. Week after
week. Month after month. Year after year. Living with someone who disapproved of you even though, to your eyes, you were less guilty of greed than he’d ever been.

  ‘I don’t exactly know how you got the details of the off-shore bank account your husband had hidden his millions of pounds of ill-gotten gains in all those years ago—and with Aslan now dead, I don’t suppose we’ll ever quite know. Maybe you got him to give you the details of where he was hiding his money. Or maybe you came across the details by accident. Or maybe he told you years ago and you’ve been sitting on the information ever since. Anyway, you finally decided that your husband could disapprove of you all he wanted, but he wasn’t going to get away with such rank hypocrisy. If he was so happy to go without money, you’d take his money from him. The money that was sitting in an off-shore account just waiting to be spent. By you. But how to do it without Aslan realising what you were up to? That was the question.

  ‘And this was when the “You Have Won a Prize” competition was born, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t Aslan who came up with the idea—like you told us—it was you. And poor, trusting Aslan was happy to agree.’

  ‘How the hell do you know all this?’ Paul asked, amazed.

  Richard turned to Fidel. ‘Perhaps you’d like to explain?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ Fidel said, proud to bursting that he was being asked to contribute. ‘Well, it was almost impossible to spot at first, but when we really drilled down through The Retreat’s accounts, we finally realised that they claimed that the hotel was running at one hundred per cent occupancy. And what hotel runs at one hundred per cent occupancy? Especially when, for most weeks of the year, there was always a Ponzi victim staying at the hotel for free. Which should have been hitting the hotel’s income massively. But according to the accounts, it wasn’t.

  ‘So we started looking at how the accounts recorded the free holidays for the Ponzi victims, and we were amazed by what we found. Because, the bills that these people were running up weren’t just written off—as you’d expect—they were all being paid in full by an off-shore company based in Turks and Caicos. A company, we guessed, that was where Aslan’s money was hidden.’

  ‘But why would she use Aslan’s money to pay for the free holidays?’ Paul asked.

  ‘It’s a classic way to launder dirty money and make it clean,’ Richard said. ‘Each free holiday generated thousands of dollars of bills and receipts—for treatments, food and alcohol—but rather than writing these bills off, as Aslan thought was happening, Rianka was using the account in Turks and Caicos to settle the bills.’

  ‘By our reckoning,’ Fidel said, ‘there have been over sixty Ponzi guests stay at The Retreat for free over the last three years—but by getting the company in Turks and Caicos to settle all of their bills, Rianka’s been able to wash over $450,000 from Aslan’s off-shore account into the hotel’s bank accounts. And how would the tax office ever know? Year after year, the hotel’s income perfectly matched the bills that the business was apparently generating.’

  ‘It was such a clever con,’ Richard said, again to Rianka. ‘And like all good cons, you were hiding your lust for money behind apparent altruism: the free holidays you were offering here at The Retreat. But once Aslan realised what you’d been up to, you knew he’d go to the police. You’d be looking at a good ten year stretch in prison. And, from your point of view, your husband had already ruined your life once—when he was arrested twenty years ago. You weren’t prepared to let him ruin your life again. That’s the way you saw it. So you decided he had to be stopped from going to the police—and stopped permanently. As for whether or not you’d have to kill anyone else to cover up the first murder, you didn’t much care, did you? That was just collateral damage. All that mattered to you was that you didn’t lose your life of luxury here.’

  Richard was looking at Rianka as he said this, and he was pleased to see that she was finally looking worried. There was a streak of pride in her that he knew he could exploit.

  ‘But the thing is, Rianka, that’s exactly what you’re about to lose. Because it’s going to be twelve feet by twelve for you for the next twenty-five years at least—fetching outfits in orange—and prison food.’ Richard could see a quiver in Rianka’s lip, but he didn’t feel even the tiniest spark of compassion. He was talking to a double murderer.

  Richard turned to Dwayne. ‘You know what? You can take her away now.’

  Dwayne pulled out a pair of handcuffs, clicked them tight onto Rianka’s wrists and read her her rights. As Dwayne then led Rianka off to the police jeep across the immaculate lawn, Richard and the others drifted out of the Meditation Space to watch.

  ‘That bitch,’ Ann said.

  This pretty much summed it up for them all and they stood in silence for a while.

  ‘You know,’ Saskia continued, ‘I never thought I’d ever say this, but that woman’s almost made me feel sorry for David Kennedy.’

  Everyone turned and looked in surprise at Saskia, so she clarified. ‘Almost.’

  ‘You know,’ Dominic said, ‘I was convinced back there for a moment that you were about to reveal that I’d killed Aslan.’

  Richard turned and looked at Dominic. ‘But how could I do that? I always said the killer had to be one of the people inside the Meditation Space, and you were never inside.’

  Dominic took a moment to work out what Richard had said, but once he’d got his head around that, he thought for a moment longer and then suddenly froze in wonder.

  ‘Hey, I don’t believe it,’ Dominic said. ‘You’re glowing.’

  Richard was thrown. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I didn’t notice before, but you do have an aura after all. And it’s golden, man. A golden halo of light like an avenging angel. That’s your aura.’

  Richard couldn’t help himself, and he found himself smiling for the second time in a day.

  ‘You just tell people what they want to hear, don’t you?’ he said.

  Dominic shrugged. ‘There are worse crimes,’ he said.

  Together, they turned and looked at Dwayne as he put Rianka into the back of the jeep, closing the door on her with a metallic clang.

  ‘You’re right, I suppose,’ Richard said. ‘There are worse crimes.’

  It turned out that the moment Rianka was banged up inside one of the police station’s cells—with an iron bed, iron bars, a strip of window and peeling paint on the walls—she’d been consumed by a deep depression. Not that she’d confessed to either murder yet, but Richard guessed it was only a matter of time. After all, the only way she’d be able to minimise her time in prison now was if she pleaded guilty.

  Two days after Rianka’s arrest, Richard was standing alone on his beach when he got a call on his mobile.

  It was Camille.

  She told him how the labs had analysed all of the material they’d found in Rianka’s sewing basket and found spots of Aslan’s blood. There had also been a number of drawing pins. They were the same brand of drawing pin as Richard and Camille had found at the Meditation Space—and one of the drawing pins had a spot of blood on it that also belonged to Aslan.

  As Camille explained all this to Richard, he took a moment to consider Aslan’s character. A one-time crook who’d changed his ways so much that he’d not touched any of his stolen money since coming out of prison.

  Maybe people were capable of change after all?

  Camille was then able to say that the autopsy report had also come in on Julia Higgins and the pathologist had found a lethal cocktail of drugs in her bloodstream, including ketamine and cyanide—which suggested that Rianka had indeed stolen the poisons from Dominic’s lab as well as the bottle she had put them in. However, the report said that Julia had actually died of asphyxiation. And the cotton fibres that the pathologist had been able to pull out of her mouth and throat matched one of the pillows that had been by her head after her body was found.

  Whoever had given her the poison to drink had then smothered her to death with a pillow over her fa
ce to make sure.

  Camille said, ‘So I just confronted Rianka with all this new evidence.’

  ‘You did?’ Richard asked, his interest finally coming into focus.

  ‘And she broke down and confessed to everything. To killing Julia. To killing her husband. She’s currently making a full statement to Fidel.’

  Richard didn’t say anything.

  ‘This is where you say well done, Camille.’

  ‘No. Of course,’ Richard said. ‘Very well done. It’s just … Camille, I’m busy this second, but I’ll be back at the station in half an hour. Okay?’

  There was a pause from Camille on the other end of the phone before she said, ‘You’re busy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Oh,’ Richard said, immediately guarded. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re busy doing nothing?’

  ‘That’s right. But thank you for all your work on this case. It’s been excellent. As ever.’

  After a moment, Camille said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ accepting the tiny olive branch she was being offered. ‘And you should know. Dwayne’s organising a big party down at Maman’s bar tonight. You know, now that Rianka’s confessed to both murders. And the Commissioner’s going to be there, too. Everyone’s coming.’

  ‘They are?’ Richard said with a rising sense of panic.

  ‘And I’m telling you in advance so you can come up with a decent excuse this time when you try and get out of coming. Okay?’

  Richard couldn’t help himself and smiled.

  ‘Thank you, Camille.’

  ‘Unless you want to come to the party, of course. It’s a pretty major success we’ve all had.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Camille,’ Richard said. ‘I’d love to—really I would—but I’ve already set aside tonight to rewire my bedside lamp.’

  There was a long pause from Camille.

  ‘I said, a good excuse.’

  ‘But it’s not an excuse,’ Richard said, a little hurt. ‘I really am doing that tonight.’

  Richard heard Camille sigh at the other end of the phone.