Robert Thorogood - A Meditation On Murder

Julia was overwhelmed by her memories and started to weep. Richard flashed a panicked look at Dwayne. What was he supposed to do now?

Dwayne stepped in.

‘Hey. We don’t have to do this now. We can take you in, get you a lawyer. Take your statement later.’

Julia turned to Dwayne with a look of gratitude, and she wiped her tears from her cheek.

‘No,’ Julia said, after a moment’s thought. ‘You have to know what happened. I owe that to Aslan.’

Richard was frankly baffled. Since when did self-confessed killers feel they owed anything to the corpse they’d just created? Dwayne looked over at his boss and shrugged that maybe they should carry on.

‘Okay,’ Richard said. ‘But don’t worry. Only a couple of questions, then we’ll be done.’

In short order, Richard got the remaining details. Julia was able to explain how she had no particular grudge against Aslan. In fact she liked him. Which was why she was stunned to discover that she’d just killed him. What’s more, she not only hated knives, she had no idea where the knife came from that she’d just used to kill Aslan, or how she’d managed to smuggle it into the Meditation Space.

In fact, Richard had to conclude, Julia seemed no less baffled by the murder than he was.

‘So, to sum up,’ Richard said checking over the notes he’d taken. ‘You say you have no motive—you have no idea where the knife came from—you don’t know how you got it into the Meditation Space with you—you have no clear memory of actually killing the victim—but you’d noneth-less like to confess to his murder?’

Julia looked at Richard.

‘But I have to. It was me. I killed him.’

Richard looked at Dwayne. Dwayne looked at Richard. Oh well, a confession was a confession. Dwayne got out his handcuffs and started to bind them to Julia’s wrists. As he did this, he cautioned her.

‘Julia Higgins, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘But before you go, can I ask you one last question?’ Richard said.

‘Of course.’

‘Do you know why there’s a drawing pin on the floor of the Meditation Space?’

Julia didn’t really understand the question.

‘What drawing pin?’

So that was the end of that.

As Dwayne led Julia off, Richard took a moment to look about himself. The old plantation owner’s house that was now the main hotel building sat in a sea of manicured lawns, and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was all wrought-iron balconies and horizontal planks of white-painted wood. But Richard also noted the other structures that were dotted around the hotel’s grounds. There was what looked like a red and gold Shinto shrine off in one clearing; a colonnade of vine-entwined Corinthian pillars straight out of Ancient Greece in another; and, up on a bluff that overlooked the sparkling sea, there appeared to be a Thai temple, with sharply sloped roofs in copper green.

It was all very strange and incongruous to Richard’s mind. As for the hotel’s guests, Richard could see that they’d apparently all vanished into thin air, although—now he was looking—he could see a clump of them down on the beach looking back at him.

Camille came over from the house and Richard went to meet her.

‘Okay,’ Camille said. ‘I’ve sent Rianka—the wife—to her room and I’ve said I’ll go to her as soon as I can. As for the other witnesses, they’re off getting changed into their normal clothes. I’ve then told them to meet by the ambulance so we can take samples.’

‘Good work. Thank you.’

‘But what did Julia say? Is she the murderer?’

‘Oh yes. She’s made a full confession.’

Camille looked at Richard and shifted her weight onto one hip, a suspicious look slipping into her eyes.

‘And yet …?’

‘I don’t know, it’s just she didn’t really make a very good fist at explaining the murder.’

‘She didn’t?’

‘No. For example, she didn’t say she had any reason to want to kill the deceased. In fact, she said how much she liked him. And she claimed she not only hadn’t seen the knife before that she used to kill him, but she had no idea where it even came from.’

‘But she’s the murderer, of course she’d say that. She’s lying.’

‘I know. But seeing as she’s already confessed to killing him, why bother to lie that she doesn’t know what her motive was, what her means were or what her opportunity was?’

Camille could see the logic of what Richard was saying.

‘And she’s also left-handed,’ Richard said.

‘She is?’

‘Or so she says.’

‘Maybe she’s trying to trick you.’

‘Maybe.’

Camille knew her boss well. ‘You don’t think she did it, do you?’

‘I don’t know what I think—but it’s definitely not stacking up. Not yet. Not if she can’t provide us with a decent means, motive and opportunity. And there’s something else as well.’ Richard paused a moment, and then turned back to face the Japanese tea house. ‘It’s this tea house. Because Julia also said Aslan locked her and the others inside it before they started their meditation.’

‘So?’

Richard looked at his partner. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

Camille refused to be drawn, so Richard explained for her.

‘Because who in their right mind would allow themselves to be locked inside a room with four other potential witnesses before committing murder?’

Camille considered this a moment and then said, ‘Oh. I see what you mean.’

‘Precisely. Why not kill him in the dead of night? Or when he’s on his own?’

Richard looked over at the Meditation Space again.

‘If you ask me, there’s something about that tea house that’s important. Something we haven’t realised yet. Either because of how it’s made—or where it’s located—but the victim had to be killed inside it in broad daylight in front of a load of other potential witnesses. Why?’

While Fidel processed the scene, Camille oversaw the paramedics taking the blood samples from the four remaining witnesses, and Richard watched all the activity from the shade of a nearby palm tree. This, in fact, meant standing nowhere near the palm tree in question that was actually shading him, but Richard had long ago learnt that a palm tree’s vertical trunk was too narrow to offer any shade from the blistering tropical sunshine. Instead, his technique was to follow the shade of the thin trunk along the ground until he found the much larger clump of shade that was thrown by the bush of fronds at the top of the tree.

Which is why, at this precise moment, if anyone had been looking, they’d have seen Richard standing in the middle of an entirely sun-bleached lawn apparently in his own personal shaft of darkness. But he wanted to take a moment to watch the four remaining witnesses interact with Camille. After all, they’d just been locked inside a room where a vicious murder had been carried out. How were they bearing up?

To this end, Richard had already got the witnesses’ check-in details from The Retreat’s receptionist.

He could see that Camille was currently talking to a woman he now knew was called Saskia Filbee. The photocopy of her passport had her down as forty-two years old. And according to the hotel’s registration card she lived in Walthamstow and worked as a temporary secretary in London. Like the other witnesses, she’d now changed back into her normal clothes and Richard could see that she’d chosen to put on a sensible A-line dress in dark blue. And he could also see from the way that Saskia listened to Camille with her head cocked slightly to one side that this was someone who was happy being told what to do.