“Don’t move.”
The man jerked so violently that the Chief wound a muscular arm around his neck and shoulders from behind and pressed the muzzle more firmly against his head.
“I said, don’t move.”
The man began to gabble. “What? What’s happening? Who are you?”
“Listen carefully. What you’re going to do now is call your men out of the forest and tell them to lay down their weapons where I can see them. If they don’t, this is going to end very badly for you.”
“You’re… Scottish? How is this possible?”
“You’re American, so we’re both a little out of our comfort zone. Call your men now and tell them to lay down their rifles.” Chief Macgregor roughened up his accent until he sounded more like Ewan Macgregor in Trainspotting and less like the posh boarding-school boy he had once been.
It must have worked, because the man called out urgently, “Stan! Lou! Come out here now.”
There were rustling and crashing sounds and the men emerged from the forest.
“What is it, boss?”
They saw a man holding a gun to their boss’s head and brought their rifles up to their shoulders immediately.
Chief Macgregor pulled the slide back on his pistol. The man drew in his breath sharply.
“Lower your weapons, fools! Throw them onto the sand in front of you and put your hands up.” As they hesitated, he screamed, “Now! Don’t keep him waiting, you idiots.”
The two men threw down their rifles and raised their hands. Then they walked slowly towards the boat.
Chief Macgregor let his breath out in a long, slow sigh as a small figure emerged from the forest behind them and picked up their rifles. It was Eulalie.
She held her pistol steadily on the three men.
“Was that an American accent I heard?” she asked.
“It was,” said Chief Macgregor.
“Boston?” she asked the leader, but he just glared at her. “Then I think the last piece of this puzzle has just fallen into place.”
Eight hours’ sleep and an extra-large bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal did much to smooth out the lingering psychological effects of what had happened on Monk’s Cay.
Eulalie dressed for the day in a no-nonsense black pantsuit with a severe black shirt. She scraped her hair into a chignon and put on a business-like amount of makeup.
She looked in the mirror and decided that she could pass for one of the bad-ass female TV detectives she enjoyed watching on Netflix. Today her job was to be intimidating.
She got to the police station at nine o’clock sharp. Chief Macgregor was already there, having been running around since early that morning to set up the scenario Eulalie had requested.
He smiled when he saw her, but a certain hollowness around his eyes told her that he hadn’t quite recovered from the fright of hearing gunshots in the forest and believing that she had been killed.
“Is everyone here?”
“Nearly,” he said. “We’re waiting for Rajesh Dev, but he’s on his way.”
“Good, because we need him.”
“Here he is now.” Chief Macgregor pointed to the deputy harbormaster who was reporting to Manny at the charge desk. “Then that’s everyone, except for the one who’s coming later. We can get started.”
Eulalie walked into the interview room and found it full of people. Damien Hodge and his mother Martha were sitting close together. Rajesh Dev walked in and took the empty seat next to them. A man in a dark grey suit with a briefcase balancing on his knee was unfamiliar to her. She figured he must be the assistant district attorney that Chief Macgregor had wanted to sit in on this interrogation. Pete Costello was sitting as far away from the Hodges as he could get. Chief Macgregor went to stand at the head of the table but sat down when Eulalie closed the door.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said as the door clicked shut. “You might already be aware that a body was found on Monk’s Cay last night. Dental records are expected to confirm later this morning that the deceased is Jessica Manilow who disappeared from Monk’s Cay five years ago.”
A ripple of reactions went around the room. Pete Costello looked stunned, while Damien and his mother exchanged anxious glances. Only the ADA seemed cheered by the news.
“I’ve spoken to several of you in recent days about Jessica’s disappearance, but none of you told me everything you knew. I’m sure you all had reasons for withholding the truth and I’d like to go into those now.”
Damien and Pete shifted in their seats.
“Mr. Dev,” Eulalie said, turning to him. “You are currently the deputy harbormaster, but five years ago you were a moorings inspector who happened to be on the boat that pulled Damien Hodge, Pete Costello and Chuck Weston aboard five years ago, correct?”
He nodded warily.
“When we spoke, you told me that the three boys stank of cane brandy when you pulled them on board. Do you stand by that assertion?”
“Oh, absolutely. It’s a very distinctive smell. You can’t mistake it, especially if you are from around here. They must have been practically swimming in the stuff.”
Eulalie turned to Damien and Pete. “Mr. Hodge and Mr. Costello, you were both careful to tell me that you had been drinking beer and only beer all day long. You repeatedly mentioned the six packs of beer you had taken with you to Monk’s Cay. You did not at any point mention cane brandy. But somehow between the time that you left Prince William Island and the time you were picked up by the harbormaster’s boat, you managed to get hold of cane brandy. Where did it come from?”
The two men glanced at each other and then away again as if the contact caused them pain.
“Mr. Costello, I appeal to you.” Eulalie turned her body so that she was blocking his view of Damien Hodge. “I don’t believe you’re a bad person. I don’t think you had anything to do with Jessica’s disappearance. I think the only thing you’re guilty of is keeping one secret at your friend’s request for all these years. I’m going to ask you to share it with us now. If you choose not to, Chief Macgregor and the assistant district attorney are going to take a less sympathetic view of your character than I have. I put it to you again – where did the cane brandy come from?”
Costello raked his fingers through his hair. “It didn’t mean anything. Damien came back with it. He went into the forest to look for more firewood and came back with a whole bottle of premium label cane brandy. We were students. We couldn’t afford anything like that – or at least I couldn’t. We were half trashed to start with, so of course we cracked that bottle open and drank it. Chuck was already throwing up into the sea, so we didn’t share it with him, but the two of us hit it hard.”
“Did Damien tell you where he’d found it?”
“I was too drunk to ask. It was only the next day that he came to me and said someone at his dad’s company would get into trouble for skimming Hodge Consortium brandy. He didn’t want to get the guy fired, so he begged me to keep just that one detail secret. He said he’d found the bottle in the forest, along with a few others. I didn’t see how it could affect the investigation into Jessica’s disappearance, so I kept my promise and stayed quiet about it.” He sank his head into his hands. “I’m so sorry.”
Eulalie turned to Damien Hodge and his mother.
“I never could figure out how a nineteen-year-old boy who had barely scraped through high school and was failing college suddenly got elevated to the position of chief financial officer of Hodge Consortium. As far as I can see, he does nothing all day except play on his Playstation and practice darts. When he’s not taking potshots at people with his modified pellet gun, that is.”
The unguarded reaction on Damien’s face told her that she had hit home. He was in awe of her deductive abilities.
“The only way it made sense,” Eulalie went on, “was if that nineteen-year old kid discovered something about his father’s company that he wasn’t meant to know and got given the CFO job to keep him quiet. Of course
, nineteen-year old boys are not the most discreet creatures on earth, so it was necessary to keep a very tight lid on him in the form of a reliable family minder. How am I doing, Damien? Am I more on target than you were when you shot at me the other day?”
Damien opened and closed his mouth like a goldfish. His mother nudged him into silence.
“Don’t answer her, darling. She is trying to trick you into speaking up. My son has nothing to say on this or any other issue, Ms. Park.”
“I’d think very carefully before following your mother’s advice, Mr. Hodge,” put in Chief Macgregor. “Remember, Jessica’s body has been found. This changes the game completely. We have evidence now – actual concrete evidence. And if any of it connects to you, you could be looking at a prosecution for murder.” He paused to let that sink in. Damien Hodge’s eyes were like saucers. “If the truth is more innocent than that, it would be a very good idea for you to come clean now. We can’t protect you unless you’re cooperating with us. There’s a lot more at stake than your family’s reputation.”
Damien’s eyes ricocheted around the room, before coming to rest on his mother. She shook her head firmly - No.
“Here’s what I think happened,” said Eulalie. “I think Damien went looking for firewood and stumbled upon a stash of cane brandy in the forest. It wasn’t just lying there on its own. I think there were people with it, people that Damien recognized. I think Hodge Consortium, which has been struggling for years, has gone into the liquor smuggling business because it is more profitable than legitimate export. Selling premium-label brandy into certain dry Middle Eastern countries is, I’m told, approximately five times more profitable than selling it for regular export. The only trouble is, it’s illegal.”
Martha Hodge made a dismissive sound in her throat, but Eulalie noticed that she had turned rather pale.
“I think our Damien stumbled upon senior members of his father’s company in the act of preparing brandy for smuggling. It wasn’t too much of a problem, though, because Damien’s a loyal guy. Of course, he wouldn’t squeal on the family business. He could easily be silenced by an appeal to family loyalty and a free bottle of brandy. But it didn’t end there. Next thing you knew, another drunk teenager came stumbling along. A girl this time. An American with no connections to Prince William Island at all. She was not nearly as easily silenced as Damien. I wonder what happened next? Did she try to run? Did she threaten to call her friends? Did she get into a struggle with one of the smugglers? Whatever the truth, she ended up dead from a stab wound between the ribs on the right side of her chest. I’m quite prepared to believe that it wasn’t planned.
“But now what? Suddenly the smugglers have a corpse to dispose of. So, they wait until the moon goes behind the clouds and they attack the three drunk boys under cover of darkness, forcing them back to their boat. I’m sure the legend of the Monk’s Cay ghost helped to scare them along. Then when the search-and-rescue party arrived at first light, Jessica’s body had already been removed from the island, to be returned and buried later when the search had died down.”
“If I can just interject at this point,” said the assistant district attorney. “I’m very interested in the role of Carson Fairweather in all this. The case I am investigating, in particular, is the death of Evan Wong, the owner of the gift shop on Prince William Island.” He turned to Martha Hodge. “What I want to know is this – who is Marcia Wong to the Hodge family?”
There was a long pause. Then Mrs. Hodge said reluctantly, “She’s my husband’s sister. She married Evan Wong a few years ago and they ran the gift shop together.”
“We were a little surprised to hear that Carson Fairweather was on Monk’s Cay on the day of Evan Wong’s murder.”
“That’s right,” Eulalie took up the story. “When the murder happened, ferry service to Monk’s Cay was halted immediately. It only resumed after 3 o’clock that afternoon. But Carson Fairweather turned up anyway, saying that he had been called to come and assist Marcia. The only way he could have been on the island at that time was if he had been there all along. He must have overhead me asking Mr. Wong questions, and Mr. Wong’s answers about stock disappearing overnight and his awareness of people and activities on the island that shouldn’t have been there. Next thing, he is murdered in a way that is carefully staged to look like an accidental electrocution. And once again, Carson Fairweather is there on the scene smoothing things over for the Hodge family.”
She glanced at Chief Macgregor who gave her a tiny nod.
A commotion could be heard outside the interrogation room. Then the door flew open and Carson Fairweather entered at speed.
“This is disgraceful,” he said. “Damien Hodge cannot be interrogated without legal advice or a responsible adult being present. This outrage stops immediately.”
His suit was disheveled and his shirt partly untucked. He looked as though he had rushed to the police station on foot and in a great hurry.
“As you can see, Mr. Fairweather,” Eulalie said. “Damien Hodge is accompanied by his mother. They both agreed to take part in this collaborative questioning process. I would also remind you that Damien Hodge is a full, legal adult who requires nobody to consent for him. But we were talking about you, Mr. Fairweather. I was about to point out to Damien and Martha that you have become a liability. You’re supposed to be a fixer, Mr. Fairweather. You’re supposed to be the person who makes the troubles go away, not the one who attracts them.
“But that’s what it’s come to, hasn’t it? First you killed Jessica to keep the secret of Hodge Consortium’s smuggling safe. Then you made sure the smuggling continued, turning a healthier profit than the company had enjoyed in years. You even planted Mr. Hodge’s sister Marcia on the island to turn a blind eye to any after-hours goings on. But you reckoned without her husband who had a habit of noticing things. Killing him was a big mistake, Mr. Fairweather. You tried to stage it as an accident, but the autopsy report establishes it as murder. The most obvious suspect is his wife, until one considers that you had no business being on that island at all.”
Mr. Fairweather made gobbling noises in his throat like an enraged turkey, but Eulalie rolled over him.
“The question I’m putting to everyone now is this – how much longer is this going to go on? Damien Hodge is now the prime suspect in the murder of Jessica Manilow. And Marcia Wong née Hodge is the main suspect in the murder of her husband. Are the Hodges of Boston, Massachusetts going to let this man bring the family down on two counts of murder, or are they willing to admit that enough is enough?”
“It was him!” Damien shot to his feet and pointed at Mr. Fairweather. “He did it. He brought brandy onto the island and made me promise not to tell, and he told me Jessica died by accident, and made me promise not to tell about that either. They offered me the job - Carson and Mom and Dad. They said I could earn a big salary and get an important title and a secretary, and they’d still let me carry on doing whatever I wanted all day. All I had to do was not tell – not about the brandy, and not about Jessica. But now it’s all gone wrong. I don’t want to go to jail. Mom, don’t let them take me to jail.”
Martha Hodge took hold of his sleeve and pulled him down to sit next to her.
“Don’t worry, darling. Mother is here. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” She turned to Chief Macgregor. “I am ready to give you a full statement, Chief. And I’m sure once I have spoken to my husband and to Marcia they will be ready to do the same. We have been guilty of greed and foolishness, but I assure you we have never been guilty of murder.”
Carson Fairweather sank into a seat and stared at her. All his years of faithful service seemed to flash before his eyes. He was one of the family. To all intents and purposes, he was a Hodge. And now they were betraying him. It had all been for nothing. Everything he had done in the name of Hodge Consortium counted for nothing. As he saw his life’s work collapsing in front of him, he seemed to deflate before the eyes of everyone in the room.
&n
bsp; The ADA stood up. “I’ll take those statements now, Mrs. Hodge.”
Epilogue
Eulalie had rarely felt such a sense of incompleteness at the end of a case.
She didn’t have all the answers, and that was frustrating.
Who was it that had pushed that boulder into the path of her friends when they were twelve years old? Or had it merely fallen?
And what about the feeling of dread that had overcame her on Monk’s Cay? Had it been just her imagination?
If an unquiet spirit really lingered on Monk’s Cay, who was it? Was it the troubled monk put to death unfairly and without due process all those years ago? Or was it his executioner?
And, more importantly, why was Eulalie Park – a modern, twenty-first-century woman – wasting her mental energy wondering about this in the middle of the night?
Turning her pillow over and punching it into shape, she rolled over in search of a comfortable spot. Her mind slipped back to that night on the island.
What would have happened if Chief Macgregor hadn’t been there? She cringed when she remembered how she had clung to his hand, trying to draw strength and warmth from his body.
Pathetic – that’s what it was.
Eulalie was okay with wanting someone, but she had never been comfortable with needing them. The only person she had ever needed was Angel. The only person who had never let her down was Angel. She wasn’t sure she could make room in her life for someone else that she truly needed.
When she remembered the warmth that had flowed from his body to hers, soothing and comforting her during her worst moments on Monk’s Cay, the panic threatened to overwhelm her. Her need for him had the potential to become very real indeed. It was something she wasn’t ready for.
For someone who had been abandoned by both parents before she was even three months old, trust came with difficulty, if at all. Her grandmother was the only person she truly trusted. In Fleur du Toit, she had a friend that she was learning to trust, but it was a slow process.
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1 Page 65
