Robert Thorogood - Murder in the Caribbean

‘Okay, Fidel, what have you got for me?’ Richard called out as he approached.

‘Well, sir, the explosion wasn’t an accident.’

‘You know that?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Let me show you.’

Fidel led Richard around the structure, and Richard could see that the wooden sides of the hull were jagged and torn in a way that looked as though a leviathan had risen from the deep, snapped the boat in two with its jaws – and this was the bit of the boat it had then tossed aside.

Passing the sharp edges of the hull, Richard saw that the interior of the boat had been mostly ripped out by the explosion, although there were still plenty of old pipes and rusting metal fixings sticking out at crazy angles. Mercifully, there were no smears of blood here, but Richard watched as Fidel stepped up to a dirty grey tube that ran along the inside of the boat and which was fixed with red cable ties.

‘Okay, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘I think that this section of the boat was once the engine compartment. And this tube here was the fuel inlet to the engine.’

‘So where’s the engine?’

‘I imagine it got blown from its housing and sank with everything else. But the thing is, on boats like this, the engines tend to be at the rear. In a tight and enclosed space directly under the driving position.’

‘Okay,’ Richard said, wondering where Fidel was going with this.

‘It can make them seriously dangerous if there’s any kind of cut or tear in the fuel inlet. Like we’ve got here.’

Fidel indicated a point on the pipe with his forefinger, and Richard could see that there was a deep cut that ran along it for about three inches.

‘How did that get there?’

‘I’ve looked at it, and it’s pretty neat. I think someone slit it open using a sharp knife.’

‘But why would they want to do that?’

‘Well, a tear in the fuel line like this isn’t enough to let much petrol leak, but it’s enough to let fumes from the petrol get out.’

‘Oh,’ Richard said, understanding finally coming to him. ‘Petrol fumes that then build up inside the enclosed space.’

‘Exactly, sir. And then, the tiniest spark and the whole thing goes up.’

‘But how did you find that rip?’ Richard asked, looking at all the dozens of feet of pipes that ran around the inside of the boat’s hull.

‘Well, sir, I was carrying out a visual inspection of the wreck when I found this.’

Fidel walked around the inside of the boat and pulled down a mess of what looked like electric cables that were tied together with parcel tape. But as Richard looked more closely, he saw that there was something else that the parcel tape was holding in place.

It was a mobile phone.

What was a mobile phone doing taped to the inside of an engine compartment?

As Richard looked again, he could see that it was one of the old-fashioned plastic phones that had no touchscreen, it just had buttons and the smallest of screens for the minimum of text.

But there were also two thin electric cables emerging from the housing of the phone – and the plastic at the end of each cable was stripped back to reveal copper wires. Richard took a step back, the sheer enormity of what Fidel had uncovered hitting him.

‘Good grief,’ he said.

Someone had sliced into the fuel pipes of the boat so that the enclosed engine compartment would fill with petrol fumes. But this person had also taped a doctored phone inside the same engine compartment. When the boat was heading out to sea, the compartment filled with petrol vapour, and this person had then rung the number of the mobile phone. The incoming call had turned on the circuit that was supposed to drive the motor that made the phone vibrate, but it had been re-routed to a couple of cables that led outside the casing. And once the current was flowing in these two little cables, the electricity had arced and caused the tiniest of sparks.

The spark had caused the petrol to explode, and the boat had blown apart.

Despite the heat, a shiver ran down Richard’s spine.

Fidel was right. Conrad hadn’t died in some tragic accident at sea.

He’d been murdered in cold blood.

CHAPTER THREE

Of the many things that irritated Richard about the tropical island of Saint-Marie, perhaps the one that infuriated him the most was just how small it was. It’s not that he had an objection to its size per se . After all, as he often had occasion to tell his team, he’d holidayed many times on the Isle of Wight as a child, so he knew something about island living. But it was one thing to take a vacation on an island, and quite another to run a Police investigation on one.

For starters there were no forensic or pathology labs on Saint-Marie, so whenever Richard needed to process any kind of physical evidence, it had to be sent ‘off island’ to Guadeloupe. But the island’s size also meant he only had access to two Police vehicles. One of these was a battered old Mark II Land Rover that was painted mustard yellow and had the crest of the Saint-Marie Police Force on the bonnet and sides. For all Richard publicly grumbled about the vehicle, he couldn’t help but feel a grudging affinity with it. Like him it was British, hadn’t even been remotely designed for tropical climes, and yet here it was, chugging along and doing the best it could in very testing circumstances.

But if Richard tolerated the Police Land Rover, the same couldn’t be said for the other Police vehicle, a sputtering Harley Davidson motorbike that had an attached, almost-certainly illegal sidecar. Only Dwayne was qualified to drive the infernal machine, and Richard only travelled in it under sufferance. After all, as he’d tell anyone who asked, if the answer is ever ‘get on a motorbike driven by Dwayne’, you’ve very definitely been asking the wrong question.

However, the most irksome aspect of island living, as far as Richard was concerned, was that the distances were often so small that the quickest way to get somewhere was to walk. And while Richard loved the idea of walking in theory – particularly on a crisp winter’s day, the grass stiff on the ground with frost – it was quite a different matter yomping through the blistering heat of the tropics wearing a thick woollen suit.

Sweating heavily, Richard arrived at Mrs Gardiner’s house, and found Camille inspecting the earth beneath the smashed window. Having updated her that he and Fidel now believed Conrad had been murdered, Richard asked what Camille had so far been able to find.

‘Not much of anything, sir,’ she said. ‘There are no footprints out here. And no cigarette butts or anything else that suggests anyone was here. And the window’s not overlooked by any of the neighbours, so they didn’t see anything, either.’

‘Did they hear the moment the window was smashed?’

‘I’ve asked whoever I can find who was nearby at the time, and no-one saw or heard anything suspicious.’

‘I see,’ Richard said, disappointed. ‘Then what about the window frame?’

Camille explained that she’d just finished inspecting the outside frame, and it was so rough and weather-beaten it wasn’t possible to lift any fingerprints from it.

‘Then what about the break-in? Has Mrs Gardiner got any theories?’

‘None. Although I asked her to have a proper look at everything that was thrown on the floor, and she said she’s not sure, but she thinks nothing’s been stolen.’

‘In which case, the break-in was all about leaving the ruby.’

‘Which is kind of crazy, sir.’

‘I’d agree with you there. Because, why bother?’

‘It’s a message, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what I’m thinking. It’s got no intrinsic value, so it must be symbolic somehow. Or a warning of some kind.’