Richard understood the importance of the point Camille was making. Pierre had been picked up from his halfway house by one of the gang members driving a grey Citroën CX.
‘And you should know, sir,’ Camille continued, ‘whoever left it in the middle of nowhere, they also set fire to it. The car’s been completely burnt out.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Richard never understood why people would come from all around the world to holiday in the Caribbean. The place was too hot and too humid. And if the heat wasn’t enough to put you off, there were creatures on land, sea and in the air that could hospitalise or outright kill you. As for the beaches, they were covered in a fine sand that, frankly, got everywhere. And, as he’d tell anyone who cared to listen, the sea was the wrong temperature. After all, when you’re boiling hot, the last thing any sane person would want to do is get into a sea that was as warm as a bath, especially considering that this particular bath contained killer sharks.
However, if he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to book a beach holiday to Saint-Marie, Richard really didn’t understand why anyone would then travel to the interior of the island. This was only partly because the centre of Saint-Marie was dominated by a dormant-but-nonetheless-not-yet-provably-dead volcano. It was also because every inch of the island that wasn’t coastline was basically jungle. Sometimes the jungle was only scrubby, or had been cut back to make space for goats or gardens, but as you travelled further inland, the tropical rainforest got thicker, the creepers that hung from the trees all the more creepy, and the sense that there was danger lurking behind every trunk became all the more justified.
It was fair to say that Richard didn’t like travelling around Saint-Marie. And yet, here he was, deep in the jungle, looking over the edge of a hairpin bend, where a burnt-out Citroën had come to rest at the base of a tree quite a few feet down the slope that led away from the road.
The car was almost completely blackened.
‘I’m not going down there,’ Richard said to Camille.
‘What are you talking about? It’s not steep. Look at Dwayne and Fidel working the scene.’
Richard looked over, and Dwayne and Fidel were indeed moving around the car without any noticeable side effects.
‘But what if there was a sudden mud slide, or earthquake?’ Richard said, looking about himself as though he was expecting the ground to open up and swallow him whole.
‘Okay, sir, you stay here. You can always read my report,’ Camille said, and headed down to the car, knowing full well her boss was too much of a control freak to leave her in charge of anything.
Richard frowned to himself. He knew exactly what his Detective Sergeant was up to, but what could he do? He couldn’t possibly stand on the road watching his team work such an important crime scene without him. There was nothing for it. He’d have to go down and join them.
Gritting his teeth, Richard took a first step onto the slope.
His foot seemed to hold. That was good.
He placed his other foot onto the dirt, but made sure that his body was turned so he was facing to the side of the slope.
‘You want any water?’ Dwayne said as he passed Richard on his way back to the Police bike on the road.
Richard realised that maybe the slope wasn’t as vertiginous as he’d first thought. He took a couple of steps further downwards and put his hands out to break his fall if he toppled over. He checked his footing again. It seemed secure enough.
Dwayne passed him again, glugging on a bottle of water.
‘You sure you don’t want any of this?’ he said, pausing long enough to offer his bottle to his boss.
Richard realised that maybe the slope really was a lot more safe than it had at first looked.
‘Thank you, Dwayne,’ he said as he took Dwayne’s proffered bottle.
Richard took a long, deep drink. There. That was better. He handed the bottle back.
‘You can just walk up and down, Chief,’ Dwayne said.
‘Yes. I see that maybe I can.’
‘Come on, let me show you what we’ve got so far,’ Dwayne said and headed over to the car.
Richard followed Dwayne and tried to avoid Camille’s eye as he increasingly realised how very firm the ground was.
‘So there was a guy up here on his motorbike,’ Dwayne said. ‘He stopped just up on the road back there, and that’s when he saw the burnt-out car down here.’
‘Do we know the witness?’
‘He’s an American tourist from Miami. And he didn’t come down here to check. He just called the car in and then went on his way.’
‘I see.’
Now that Richard was closer, he could see that the car had come to rest on the slope somewhat askew, and it was the ‘uphill’ section of the car that had burnt through most thoroughly. There was an area to the front left of the car that was the furthest down the slope which hadn’t burnt at all.
The paint on this undamaged section of the car was grey.
‘And it’s a Citroën CX?’ Richard asked, going to look at the paintwork.
‘Sure is, Chief. Just like the CX that apparently picked up Pierre from his house.’
Richard looked high above the car, and saw sunbeams slicing through the canopy of trees. He could well imagine someone driving or pushing the car off the road, and then setting fire to it. The dense foliage above would help diffuse the smoke, and he knew that the road was rarely used. If you wanted somewhere to set fire to a car, it was almost ideal.
‘What about the car’s owner?’ he asked.
‘Whatever documents were inside were burnt when the car went up,’ Fidel said. ‘But we’ve got the number plate. We’ll run it through the computer back at the station.’
‘What else did you find?’ Camille asked.
‘Nothing much,’ Fidel said. ‘Although Dwayne thinks the car was maybe stolen.’
‘You do?’ Camille said as she went around to the driver’s side where Dwayne was indicating, and he showed her a flatheaded screwdriver that was jammed into the melted steering wheel column.
‘Someone used a screwdriver to hotwire the car?’ Camille said, surprised. ‘I didn’t think that worked any more.’
Like any good copper, Camille knew that before electronic keys became common, criminals could hotwire some models of car by hammering a large screwdriver into the ignition slot. It destroyed the lock, but it was then possible to twist the screwdriver handle as though it were a key and start the engine that way.
‘It worked up until about the early nineties,’ Dwayne said, and then he realised that he’d perhaps revealed a bit too much about his past. ‘Not that I’ve used the technique myself, you understand. I’ve just got friends who have. But this is a seriously old car. Easily from before 1990, so the screwdriver in the ignition must have worked.’
‘Which suggests the car was stolen.’
‘I reckon so. And I bet it was chosen because the old trick of the screwdriver would work.’
‘And then our car thief drove the car to pick Pierre Charpentier up from his halfway house. And then what?’
‘No idea, but the car ended up here, didn’t it? We know that much.’
‘But why?’ Fidel asked.
‘Good question,’ Camille said. ‘If this is the car that was used to pick Pierre up, what’s it doing all the way up here? What do you think, sir?’ Camille asked, looking over at her boss, but Richard had vanished.
‘Sir?’ she asked again.
There was still no sign of Richard.
Camille went down the slope and skirted around the bonnet of the car until she found Richard on his haunches examining the front left wheel of the vehicle with a magnifying glass. It was the only wheel on the whole vehicle that hadn’t caught fire.
‘Sir,’ Camille said. ‘Dwayne thinks the car was stolen.’
‘Quiet, Camille. I’m concentrating.’
Richard fished out his pearl-handled pocket knife and oh-so-carefully inserted it into the
tread of the tyre. Camille got down to look at what her boss was doing and saw that there was a tiny but bright-white piece of gravel stuck in the rubber of the tread.
‘What is it?’
‘Gravel.’
‘Gravel?’
‘Yes, Camille,’ Richard said testily. ‘Gravel.’
Taking out a little see-through evidence bag, Richard used his knife to prise the tiny bit of gravel out of the wheel and into the bag.
‘But not just any gravel,’ Richard said, prising out another piece that was jammed into the tread and placing it into the bag to join the first sample. ‘This is white gravel. And you’ll notice that there’s no white gravel on the ground here in the jungle. And none on the road back up there. And you’ll also recall I’m sure how the area around the halfway house where Pierre was staying was just dirt as well. So where did this white gravel come from?’
‘Well, anywhere on the island, sir.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so. But I’ll know it for sure when I compare these samples against my soil collection.’
‘Oh okay, you’ve got to stop right there, sir. You have a soil collection?’
‘Of course,’ Richard said. ‘I put it together when I first arrived on the island. I went to all the beaches, dirt roads, tracks and so on I could find and took samples of the soil, sand and gravel. I then labelled and categorised them for just this situation.’
Camille stifled a laugh.
‘What?’ Richard said.
‘Oh nothing, sir. That’s all normal.’
‘What is?’
‘Collecting samples from every dirt track and beach on the island.’
‘It’s normal for a Police officer who wants to solve crimes,’ Richard said, straightening to his full height, although he was still downhill from Camille, so his eyeline was below his subordinate’s. ‘Now, I suggest we go post-haste to my shack and see if we can find a match for these bits of gravel. Then maybe we’ll find out where this car was before it came here.’
Leaving Dwayne and Fidel to finish processing the scene, Richard got Camille to drive him to his home on the beach. There was still a part of her that thought her boss was joking, but she realised how serious he was when he pulled out a cardboard box from under his bed and opened the lid to reveal hundreds of test tubes of different soil, sand and gravel samples, all of them labelled and dated.
‘Wow,’ Camille said.
‘Wow indeed,’ Richard said, misunderstanding entirely the angle at which his partner was entering the conversation.
Camille made her excuses and left, but Richard hardly noticed. He was already beginning to work through his library of soil samples.
A few hours later, Richard strode back into the Police station and announced, ‘Well, that was very interesting.’
He was gratified to see that Dwayne and Fidel had returned from processing the burnt-out car. This meant they could share in his discovery, too.
Camille looked up from her desk and decided that she was happy to play along for once.
‘Okay, sir. What did you find in your collection?’
‘It’s what I didn’t find, that’s what’s so interesting,’ Richard said.
Camille reminded herself that she should never ‘play along’ with her boss’s games.
‘Okay. Then what didn’t you find, sir?’
‘A match, that’s what I didn’t find. I went through my entire library of gravel samples, and couldn’t find a single sample that in any way matched the white gravel I got from the tyre treads of the Citroën.’
Camille didn’t immediately reply.
And nor did Fidel or Dwayne.
‘Because that means,’ Richard said, ploughing on regardless, ‘that the gravel I found in the Citroën’s tyre is almost certainly not from any naturally occurring source nearby.’
‘And that’s good because . . .?’ Dwayne asked.
‘Because it suggests to me, Dwayne, that the gravel is perhaps manmade.’
‘And that’s good because . . .?’ Dwayne repeated.
‘Because it means the gravel was bought in a shop. And if it was bought in a shop, then we’ve maybe got a chance of identifying who bought that gravel, and therefore where the car was when it got some of it trapped in its tyres.’
Richard noticed that Camille, Fidel and Dwayne were all still somewhat underwhelmed. What was wrong with his team? Richard thought to himself. Sometimes they seemed to lack any thrill in the hunt. Very well, he decided. It was their loss, not his. He’d pursue the gravel angle without them.
‘What have we got on the grey Citroën so far?’
‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, picking up his notes. ‘It belongs to a local fisherman called Michel Branet. I’ve spoken to him, and he says he doesn’t use his car much, but he thought it was still in the car park behind the main harbour. After I asked him to go check, he called back a few minutes later and said his car was missing.’
‘Can his testimony be trusted?’
‘He’s an old boy I’ve known for years,’ Dwayne said. ‘And I wouldn’t trust him to keep his boat ship-shape or safe, but he’s not a criminal, and there’s no reason to think he’s lying.’
‘So it’s not possible he set the car on fire himself to claim the insurance?’
‘I asked him that, sir,’ Fidel said. ‘And he said it was such an old car, he didn’t have any insurance. And we’ve no record of him calling in the car as missing, so it doesn’t feel like a scam to me.’
‘Then remind me, Fidel,’ Richard said. ‘Is the car park behind the harbour in any way gravelled?’
‘I don’t think so, sir. It’s just dirt.’
‘That’s right, it’s just dirt!’ Richard pronounced, and headed back to the office’s whiteboard. ‘So we still can’t explain how our mystery gravel got into the wheels of Michel’s car.’
As Richard wrote up the words ‘Mystery Gravel’ on the board, he called back to Camille.
‘So what have you been doing, Camille?’
‘Well sir,’ Camille said, happy to get the conversation off the subject of gravel, ‘I’ve been running checks on Stefan Morgan, just to see if his story checks out.’
‘Good thinking.’
‘And I reckon it does. He only owns one car, and it’s a white Nissan, just like he said. But more importantly, I rang the General hospital on Guadeloupe, and he really was having an MRI scan when Conrad’s boat exploded. In fact, he was having a forty-minute scan, it started at 10.30am and finished at 11.10am.’
‘Which is ten minutes after the boat exploded. Is there any way he could have made a call while he was receiving the scan?’
‘I asked, and the scan is one of those machines you get slid into lying down and wearing only a gown. If he’d had any kind of mobile phone on him – or any electronic device, apparently – it would have shown up on the scan.’
‘So he’s in the clear. Whatever beef he has with Pierre Charpentier, he wasn’t involved in killing Conrad. Pierre remains our number one suspect. Has anyone made any progress in tracking him down?’
Richard’s team shook their heads and answered that they hadn’t.
‘I’m pushing my contacts as hard as I can,’ Dwayne said. ‘But it’s like the whole island has forgotten about him.’
Richard remembered that he’d put in a call to the only person who had visited Pierre in prison.
‘Have there been any calls from that priest? What was his name?’ Richard went to his desk and checked his notes. ‘That’s right. Any message from Father Luc Durant?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Camille said with a shrug.
‘Better late than never, then,’ a friendly voice said from the doorway. Richard looked over and saw a thick-set man wearing a black shirt, black suit, black shoes, and a little white dog collar around his neck. The man looked to be about seventy years old, and had the puffy face and laugh lines of someone who lived life well.
‘Are you Father Luc Durant?’
‘Guilty as char
ged,’ Luc said with a warm chuckle, and offered his hand for Richard to shake. It felt soft to the touch, Richard noted.
‘I’ve been meaning to call you back, but I was passing, so I thought I’d visit in person to tell you what I know about Pierre face to face. Although I’m not sure what a humble parish priest can do to help the Police.’
‘Well, let’s see about that,’ Richard said, and then suggested they move to the veranda outside.
‘Of course,’ Father Luc said.
Once they were outside, Camille joined them.
‘Ah, Camille. How’s your mother?’ Luc asked.
‘Very well, Father. But I’m sorry to say, she won’t be coming back to church any time soon.’
Father Luc smiled easily, and Richard wondered what Father Luc had done to offend Camille’s mother, Catherine. He then realised what a foolish question this was. Camille’s mother was both French and female, so really there’d have been any number of ways she might have taken or caused offence.
As for Father Luc, he smiled.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The church is never in any rush to get its sheep back. They all seem to wander back of their own accord in the end.’ He then gently clasped his hands together in front of his swelling belly. ‘Now, how can I help you?’
‘I understand you’re the visitor at the Central Prison?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you visited a prisoner there called Pierre Charpentier?’
‘Oh yes. I even helped Pierre prepare for his parole board. So I’m slightly worried that the Police would be asking about him so soon after his release.’
‘Well, his name’s come up in conjunction with another case. So we just wondered. Can you tell us what you can about him? According to Pierre’s file, you saw him every two or three months?’
‘That’s right. I try and visit all the prisoners once a month or so. And I have to admit Pierre seemed like a typical prisoner. When he was transferred to Saint-Marie from the UK, he was sullen and suspicious. Particularly of me. They’re like wounded animals, prisoners, I always think. You have to gain their trust. It takes time. So I’d sit with Pierre and talk to him about whatever was going on in his life. Work in the laundry room. Or sewing mail bags. Anyway, over a number of months, I saw him settle into prison life, and I could see him find his place.’
Murder in the Caribbean Page 10
