The Killing Of Polly Carter. Robert Thorogood
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her, she ran down the steps!’
As Sophie looked down to the beach far below, she finally understood why Claire had been pushing herself so desperately along. It was only this far around the curve of the cliff top that it was possible to look back and see the stone steps that ran in loose zig-zagging flights from the top of the cliff all the way down to the private beach a hundred or so feet below.
There was a body lying in the sand at the base of the cliff.
A body that was wearing the same bright yellow dress that Polly Carter had been wearing only moments earlier.
Sophie turned to look at Claire and saw that she was physically shaking, and her eyes were wide and staring as she replied, ‘She said I was evil, she said I’d ruined her life …’ Claire took a sharp intake of breath to allow herself to finish her sentence. ‘She said she was going to end her life.’
‘What?’
‘She said it was all my fault. That she was going to end her life. And then she ran down the steps and jumped!’
Sophie knew that Claire could wait. As a trained nurse, she was needed elsewhere.
‘Don’t move,’ she said, before starting to sprint back along the cliff top, her breath loud in her ears as she pumped her arms hard, knowing that every second of delay could be critical. She had to get to Polly.
Reaching the stairs that led down to the beach, Sophie didn’t stop to think, she just barrelled down them—taking the uneven stone steps two at a time as she careened down the cliff, her arms out wide for balance, until her flip-flopped feet finally slapped onto the hard white sand far below.
Sophie took a moment to recover her breath. She then looked around to see if there was anyone nearby who could help, but the beach was entirely empty, perhaps unsurprisingly so. At this time in the morning, everyone else was almost certainly back at the house.
But Sophie could see that the body in the yellow dress was lying near the base of the cliff about thirty feet away.
It was Polly. And she wasn’t moving.
Sophie strode across the sand as quickly as she could, but even as she approached the body, she could see that Polly’s legs were splayed at an almost unnatural angle—she had an arm jammed under her body—and her eyes were closed.
Sophie bent down, put two fingers to Polly’s neck and tried to find a pulse.
There wasn’t one.
Sophie gulped.
She stepped back, looked back up to the top of the cliff and saw the tiny figure of Claire still looking down from her wheelchair.
Sophie cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted up, ‘We need an ambulance! At once!’
At the same time that Claire pushed herself back to the house and Sophie turned the body of Polly Carter over to see if she could begin to administer CPR, Richard Poole was inside his shack having a shower. Or rather, in a world where the shower mixer provided him with periods of cold water interspersed with impossible-to-judge periods of water so hot it could sear skin, he was trying to time his dips into the shower so that he could wash his hair without getting third-degree burns. And it was just as he was waiting for the next pulse of boiling water to hit him—with his eyes scrunched up against the shampoo already dripping down his face—that Richard felt something skitter up his leg and then stop at his knee.
Richard froze.
There was a creature on his leg. And he was completely naked. His hand reached ever-so-slowly for his towel so he could wipe the soap from his eyes and finally see what stinging scorpion or venomous spider had just run up his leg. But before he could reach his towel, the creature started running upwards again and Richard opened his eyes against the screaming pain of soap, saw a bright green lizard racing up his thigh—a lizard that Richard had been sharing his shack with ever since he’d first arrived on the island, and who, in more innocent times, he’d thought it would be amusing to name Harry—but before the creature could reach the danger area of Richard’s groin, he grabbed up his towel, swiped, missed, slipped on some soap, and fell arse over tip to the floor.
As Richard lay bruised and panting on the floor of his shower room under a stream of water that was sometimes freezing cold and at other times boiling hot, the sting of soap still in his eyes, and with a crushing sense of defeat from being once again outwitted by a reptile only eight inches long, he decided that yes, now he was surely the unluckiest person on the whole island of Saint-Marie that day.
And he was still wrong. Because that honour belonged to the world-famous supermodel, Polly Carter.
Because it was the day she was pushed from the top of a cliff, fell nearly a hundred feet to the hard sand below, and broke her spine and neck on impact, dying instantly.
It was the day Polly Carter was murdered.
Richard Poole’s dark secret was that his mother Jennifer was about to arrive on the island. Why on earth she’d chosen to visit on her own, Richard had no idea, but he also had no idea how he was going to get through two weeks of keeping her company, and that seemed the more pressing problem.
It’s not that Richard didn’t like his mother. In fact, if he interrogated his feelings, he knew that he must even love her, it’s just that she was so perfect that he found her company exhausting. Her clothes were perfect, her friends were perfect, her whole life was perfect. She didn’t complain, she didn’t even express her feelings as far as Richard could tell, she just got up before everyone else, did more than everyone else, and then retired to bed once she’d done all the cleaning and tidying up and made sure that everyone else had turned in first.
If even a single thread stuck up from any of the immaculate plush carpets in her home, Jennifer would get down on her hands and knees and use nail scissors to give the individual thread a haircut. And after she did the washing up—always wearing washing-up gloves, of course—she’d then put on a second pair of washing-up gloves so that she could wash up the first set of washing-up gloves—unaware, Richard thought, that she risked falling into a logical feedback loop where she spent the rest of her life washing up the gloves she’d just used to wash up in. When Richard had tried to explain this to his mother, she’d smiled delightedly–‘You’ve always been so clever, darling’—and then gone off to plump up sofa cushions with her bare fists.
It was fair to say that Richard had a complicated relationship with his mother.
Far more so, in fact, than he did with his father. After all, his father, Graham—a one-time Superintendent in the Leicestershire Police Force—was entirely consistent in how he handled his son. No matter what Richard did, it always left his father disappointed. What was more, Graham was always the first to point that he’d done the same thing as Richard, but much better—or at an earlier age—or he’d chosen to go down a different path entirely.
So, when Richard was the first member of his family to be sent to private school, his father had managed to give the impression that it was only because no one thought Richard was clever enough to get into the local state-funded grammar school, where Graham had himself gone. And as top scholar—a fact Graham managed to mention nearly every time he was alone with his son, which, if truth being told, wasn’t that often.
Seven years later, when Richard got a place at Cambridge University, he finally felt that he’d proven to his father that he did indeed have a brain, but on the one occasion that Graham Poole visited his son in the three years he was there, Graham spent the day pronouncing that he himself had of course gone to the ‘University of Life’ where he’d learnt the real lessons in life, got the rough edges knocked off him quicker, and he’d not turned out too badly, had he?
When Richard announced