Murder in the Caribbean

by Robert Thorogood

  ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC 1 TV series Death in Paradise.

  He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1972. When he was 10 years old, he read his first proper novel – Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House – and he’s been in love with the genre ever since.

  He now lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire with his wife and children.

  Also by Robert Thorogood

  A Meditation on Murder

  The Killing of Polly Carter

  Death Knocks Twice

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

  Copyright © Robert Thorogood 2018

  Robert Thorogood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008238223

  Praise for Robert Thorogood

  ‘Very funny and dark with great pace.

  I love Robert Thorogood’s writing.’

  Peter James

  ‘This second Death In Paradise novel is a gem.’

  Daily Express

  ‘Deftly entertaining … satisfyingly pushes all the requisite Agatha Christie-style buttons.’

  Barry Forshaw, The Independent

  ‘For fans of Agatha Christie.’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘A treat.’

  Radio Times

  ‘This brilliantly crafted, hugely enjoyable and suitably goosebump-inducing novel is an utter delight from start to finish.’

  Heat

  ‘A brilliant whodunnit.’

  Woman

  For Rosie Evans

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Booklist

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Extract

  About the Publisher

  Where do you want me to start? At the beginning? Okay. Then you have to go back twenty years. That’s when it all began. With a single gunshot. Nothing before then matters. I was born, I lived my life, but it was in that moment that everything changed. Everything. You can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like. You think you can, but you can’t. I used to think the feelings inside me would go away. Somehow. That it wasn’t possible to feel like this forever. But guess what? It is. Not that I let on. I got good at hiding it. It used to surprise me, how everyone would look at me and think I was normal. They didn’t know about the furnace I had churning inside me. It became like a game. I’d see how normal I could be. No-one ever knew the truth. And over the years, the decades, that fire inside me changed. It got tighter and denser. And then one day, I realised it wasn’t a fire at all. It had become like a diamond. A diamond of pure hate. It made me laugh to feel that power inside me. Knowing that it was what was keeping me sane. And then, finally, the twenty years were up, and I knew I was ready. It was time. Time for revenge.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ordinary Police Officer Dwayne Myers had lived in the same house his whole adult life. It was a concrete-poured bungalow that was set in lush jungle that rose behind and above the sleepy town of Honoré on the western coast of the Caribbean island of Saint-Marie.

  Where the money had come from to buy such a desirable plot of land was, fortunately for Dwayne, never quite established by the Saint-Marie Tax Office. He was also lucky that he’d not had a visit from the island’s Planning Officer since then because, while he’d started building a two-storey house, his money had run out half way through. This meant that when he took occupancy of his new home, his builders had only completed the ground floor, although they’d left the necessary steel rods poking up out of the ‘roof’ should Dwayne ever wish to finish building the floor above.

  He never had.

  In fact, as the years passed, Dwayne had come to like the way the steel rods jutted out of his bungalow. You always knew which house was his, he’d say proudly to anyone who asked.

  But then, the unfinished house was entirely in keeping with the decades-long decline that had gripped Dwayne’s front yard. Where there wasn’t dirt, there were rusting motorbike parts, and where there was neither, there were weeds, some of which had grown into fully fledged bushes. And littered around as though dropped by an absent-minded giant was the front end of an old taxi, a trailer on tyres that had lost their rubber years ago, and a wooden speedboat that was rotting into the ground where it lay.

  However, on this particular morning, perhaps the most surprising feature of Dwayne’s garden was the Englishman in a suit who was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes while hiding in a bougainvillea bush by the front gate.

  The man was Detective Inspector Richard Poole.

  He’d been staking out Dwayne’s house for the last hour, and he was deeply unhappy. Not that that was much of a change for Richard. He’d been born unhappy.

  As for why he was hiding in a bush, that could easily be explained by the fact that, three weeks before, Dwayne had announced that he wanted to study for his sergeant’s exam. Richard had been suspicious from the start, if only because Dwayne had never before tried to advance his career in any way. Frankly, it was sometimes a struggle to get him to attend his annual appraisal.

  Something was up. Richard was sure of it. And when he learned that Saint-Marie Police regulations allowed officers studying for exams to spend a morning a week at home for ‘personal study’, he realised what it was. Dwayne had embarked on the whole endeavour as an elaborate ruse to bunk off work one morning a week, hadn’t he?

  That’s why Richard had spent the last hour hiding inside a bush, a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes while trying to ignore the spiders and other stinging insects that could at any moment be crawling into his shirt collar. Or up his trouser leg. And he was very definitely ignoring the rivers of sweat that were running down his back, and the feeling of itching and prickly heat as it built up on his skin where it was touching his thick woollen suit. But he wasn’t leaving his bougainvillea bush. Not until he’d proven that Dwayne was skiving.

  Richard saw movement and swivelled his binoculars just in time to see Dwayne throw back the curtains of his bedroom window and yawn. Luckily for Richard, the windowsill and brickwork saved him from
finding out if the bottom half of Dwayne was as similarly naked as the top half, but this was the confirmation Richard had been looking for. He checked the time on his wristwatch. It was nearly 11am.

  ‘Got you,’ Richard muttered to himself.

  Richard smashed out of the bush, opened the crumbling picket gate that led onto Dwayne’s property – and then, when he found that the picket gate had come off in his hands, he put the whole thing to one side so he could stride unencumbered up to Dwayne’s front door.

  With a sharp rat-a-tat of his knuckles against the door, Richard announced his presence.

  There was no answer, but Richard wasn’t in a rush. He waited a little while longer and then he knocked on the door again. But much louder this time. After a few more seconds, Richard was gratified to hear the slap of feet as Dwayne approached. The security chain rattled as it was unhooked, and the door finally opened.

  ‘And what time do you call this?’ Richard said, pointing to his wristwatch, before realising that the door hadn’t been opened by Dwayne.

  In fact, it had been opened by a woman with mussed-up blonde hair. And she was barefoot, Richard noticed, just before he realised that this was because she wasn’t wearing any trousers for that matter. As for the rest of her clothes, it very much seemed to Richard as though the woman was holding a bath towel loosely across her front, and was possibly otherwise completely naked.

  Oh heavens, Richard realised in a panic, the woman had answered the door wearing next to no clothes! He immediately fixed his eyes on an area of space directly above the woman’s left shoulder, causing the woman to laugh easily as she turned her head to call back into the room.

  ‘Dwayne, it’s your boss,’ she said with what Richard recognised as an Edinburgh accent.

  Before Richard could ask how this woman could possibly know who he was, she turned and padded off into the recesses of the house, Richard making sure to keep his eyeline fixed firmly mid-air.

  ‘What are you doing here, Chief?’ Dwayne said as he came to the door. Richard finally lowered his eyes and was relieved to see that Dwayne had thrown on a bright blue silk dressing gown that depicted Chinese fighting dragons, even if it only just reached down to the top of his thighs.

  ‘What am I doing here?’

  ‘Sure. You’re supposed to be at work.’

  Richard was rendered almost speechless. Almost.

  ‘You answer the door and have the gall to say that it’s me who should be at work?’

  ‘Oh I see, something’s up at the station, and you’ve come to pull me from my books.’

  ‘Your books?’

  ‘Sure. You know what it’s like. Thursday is for home study.’ As Dwayne said this, he winked slowly for his boss’s benefit.

  ‘Why did you just wink at me?’

  ‘Because, Chief, Thursday is for “home study”,’ Dwayne said with another slow wink.

  ‘But that’s clearly not what’s going on here. Especially as I just saw you open the curtains to your bedroom wearing next to nothing. Not to mention your friend I just met, whoever she is.’

  ‘That’s Amy,’ Dwayne said with a delighted smile. ‘She’s something, isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m sure we can all agree she’s something, but she shouldn’t be walking around in a towel on Police time.’

  ‘But she’s not on Police time. She’s on holiday.’

  ‘I don’t care what she’s doing on the island,’ Richard interrupted, ‘it’s what you’re doing on the island that bothers me. Because you’re supposed to be using Thursday mornings for personal study time.’

  ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

  ‘Because it’s supposed to be what you’re doing!’

  This statement seemed to take Dwayne by surprise.

  ‘But you never really meant that, did you?’

  ‘Of course I meant it!’

  Richard took a deep breath to steady his rising blood pressure. Dwayne was a good copper in many respects, but it was safe to say that his and Richard’s approach to work weren’t entirely universe-adjacent.

  ‘Oh right,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘You actually want me to be doing personal study on my mornings off.’

  ‘They’re not mornings off, they’re study periods!’

  ‘Okay okay,’ Dwayne said, holding up his hands, ‘you’ve made your point. I’ll make sure I work every Thursday from now. But don’t worry, no harm done. I mean, it’s not like there’s much going on on the island at the moment.’

  Before Richard could reply that it really wasn’t for Dwayne to decide what was or wasn’t ‘going on’ on the island, they both saw a flash of light from the direction of Honoré harbour that was followed a few seconds later by the crack and boom of a massive explosion.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Richard said as a thick cloud of black smoke started to blossom from about half a kilometre out to sea.

  ‘I don’t know about you, Chief, but that looked to me like an explosion.’

  Richard turned back to his subordinate and dead-eyed him.

  ‘Dwayne. Get dressed. Personal study’s over.’

  By the time Richard and Dwayne arrived at the harbour, the smoke from the explosion had long since cleared, and they found Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey and Police Officer Fidel Best securing the Police launch, which was really no more than an old wooden skiff that had a pair of massive engines strapped onto the back and the words ‘Saint-Marie Police’ written in white down the side.

  ‘Did you see that, sir?’ Fidel asked, as he pulled the old tarpaulin off the steering position.

  ‘Of course I did, or what do you think I’m doing here?’

  ‘Anyone know what it was?’ Dwayne asked.

  ‘I was on the veranda of the station when it happened,’ Camille said, ‘and I saw a ball of fire out in the harbour. I think a boat went up.’

  ‘Then we need to get out there,’ Richard said as he boarded the boat and sat down on the bench that ran down one of the sides.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Camille said, joining him as Dwayne cast off. Camille started the twin engines, Dwayne stepped onto the boat and it started to move off.

  ‘Not too fast!’ Richard yelped as Camille opened the throttle and the boat started to surge through the water.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ Camille asked over the roar of the engines.

  ‘Not too fast!’

  ‘Can’t hear you, sir,’ Camille shouted as Richard’s old school tie freed itself from his suit jacket and started flapping wildly behind him. It was perhaps a sign of how seriously Richard was holding on for dear life that he didn’t make any attempts to grab it and force it back down the front of his suit jacket so that sartorial decorum could be restored.

  As Camille drove the boat in a wide arc around the clutch of yachts that were at anchor, she, Dwayne and Fidel shared grins, knowing how much their boss hated any kind of physical danger, real or imagined.

  They came across their first piece of debris from the explosion less than a minute later and Camille cut the engines, the launch slowing to a slooshy stop almost immediately.

  Looking about themselves, the Police could see that it was one of those days in the tropics of almost perfect stillness. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sea seemed to be breathing as it gently rose and fell, and there were sparkling diamonds of reflected light all around them on the water. But there were also what looked like thousands of different-sized pieces of ripped-up wood floating on the surface of the water.

  ‘Look, over there!’ Fidel said, and they all saw that there was something much larger floating in the water just off their port bow.

  With a quick squirt of power, Camille steered the launch towards the object, and it revealed itself to be the back end of an old boat. The prow should have been pointing vertically downwards towards the sea bed, but Richard could see that the front half of the boat was missing from where the explosion had split it in two.

  The section of the stern that was
still just above the water line had the boat’s name written in white letters. It was called Soundman.

  ‘Anyone know who owns the boat?’ Richard asked, before he realised that his team was looking at an area of the hull just above the painted name. As Richard looked for himself, he could see why. There was a bright smear of what looked like blood. In fact, the way the smear ran down the wood, it was easy to imagine that someone who was heavily bleeding had briefly clung to the side of the boat before subsiding and slipping into the sea. There even appeared to be a rather macabre handprint in blood just to the side of the smear.

  ‘I’ll call the coastguard,’ Dwayne said, pulling out his phone. ‘They can maybe winch the boat out of the water and help us get it back to shore. And in answer to your question, Chief, Soundman belongs to a guy called Conrad Gardiner. He lives in a house on the beach to the side of the harbour.’

  ‘And what do you think happened here?’

  Richard’s subordinates looked at each other, nonplussed.

  ‘It exploded,’ Fidel eventually said.

  ‘I can see it exploded,’ Richard said in exasperation. ‘But how did it explode? Do boats normally explode?’

  This time it was Dwayne’s turn to answer.

  ‘No, Chief.’

  Richard pulled a hankie from his jacket pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, his face, and then the back and front of his neck.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we need to keep this bit of boat above water. And we also need to keep our eyes peeled for any survivors.’

  Even as Richard said this, he could see that there was no-one in the water near the debris, either alive or dead.

  Within half an hour, the coastguard’s bright yellow rescue boat had arrived and was starting to winch the rear end of the boat onto its deck. This allowed Richard to order Fidel and Dwayne to stay with the coastguard and coordinate the safe return of the boat while he and Camille drove the Police launch in wide circles through the expanding spread of floating debris. All they found were various pieces of detritus – from plastic jerry cans to kitchen implements and even an old white plastic chair – but they couldn’t find anything that seemed to shed any light on exactly what had happened.