The Killing Of Polly Carter. Robert Thorogood
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the thought to one side, Richard looked again at how the gap in the thorns was directly above where Polly’s body had been found on the sand far below, and decided that Fidel was almost certainly right. This was where Polly had fallen to her death. In which case, what had Polly cut her arm on? Richard couldn’t immediately see any blood on the steps or anything obviously woody that might have imparted the green tinge they found on her hands and around the cut in her arm.
Fidel already had the crime scene kit to hand, so Richard got out a spray bottle of Luminol and the portable ultraviolet lamp. If Polly had already been bleeding when she went over the edge—as seemed likely—then there should be evidence of blood spatter on the red earth where she’d gone over.
Richard sprayed a fine mist of liquid Luminol over the dirt where he thought Polly’s blood might have dropped. He then shone the ultraviolet light over the same ground immediately afterwards. Blotches of blood immediately started to fluoresce a purplish silver under the UV light.
‘Okay, so there are drops of blood here,’ Richard said. ‘Good work, Fidel. This is now a secondary crime scene. Please secure and process it. In particular, I want you to check if there’s any trail of blood spots that leads to here, or whether the blood is in fact confined to this one site.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Richard creaked back to a standing position, pulled his hankie from his jacket pocket and tried to wipe the sweat from his face and back of his neck.
Camille could see that her boss was troubled.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Well, don’t those spots of blood strike you as odd?’
Camille had played this game often enough to know that it was quicker if she just pleaded ignorance. ‘No, sir. Not odd in any way. So why don’t you tell me why they’re odd.’
‘Because,’ Richard said, ‘if this blood came from Polly’s wound in her arm—which seems to be a fair working assumption—then where’s the object that caused the cut?’
Camille thought for a moment. ‘Maybe she cut herself elsewhere and that’s where the object still is.’
‘But you’ve seen the blood spatter. It looks as though it’s localised to this one step here.’ Richard looked about himself, nonplussed. ‘Okay, let’s work this through. I think the moss on her arm means that she was cut by a branch or bit of wood.’
‘That seems reasonable.’
‘And it will have to have been of decent size to cause such a deep wound.’
‘That also seems reasonable.’
‘So where is it?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.’
Richard and Camille started looking for any kind of loose piece of wood in the scrubby bushes that ran up and down the seaward side of the stone staircase. For Richard, this task required nerves of steel, if only because it involved going right up to the edge of the staircase—a vertical drop to almost certain death only inches beyond—and then reaching in to the bush to see if there was any loose branch hidden inside. And it really didn’t help that the bushes were all thorn bushes.
Richard called out a sudden ‘Ow!’ for the hundredth time as he removed his right hand from one of the thorn bushes, and Camille found herself having to suppress a smile. Watching her boss in his woollen suit pull thorns from his hand while halfway up a cliff face in the searing Caribbean heat, she couldn’t help but conclude that he was one of the most extraordinary men she’d ever met. And even though she mostly found him stubborn, arrogant and lacking in any kind of human warmth, there was no denying that, as a policeman, he got results. And for that, Camille could almost forgive him all his other personal failings. Almost forgive him.
‘Aha!’ Richard called out from further down the steps.
‘What is it?’
Camille headed down to join her boss, who she could see was standing at the next bend in the steps as they zig-zagged down the cliff face. Here—where the steps turned down for the next flight—some proper bushes had been allowed to grow up to about shoulder height in the red dirt, and Richard was on his hands and knees lifting the lower branches on a particularly vicious-looking thorn bush.
As Camille arrived, Richard called back to her, ‘Don’t come any closer.’
He then reached into the bush and carefully pulled an object out.
It was an old bit of driftwood about four feet long. And it was covered top to bottom in a green moss from being in the sea for so long.
‘Now, can you tell me what a piece of driftwood is doing hidden in a bush halfway up a cliff?’
Richard turned the branch over in his hands. At one end, there was still a bit of wood sticking out at a sharp angle where another section of branch had snapped off. This snapped-off bit of branch was only an inch or so long, but Richard and Camille could both see that there were dark stains on it—and around that end of the branch as well.
As the UV lamp and bottle of Luminol were soon able to confirm, the dark patches around the stubby bit of broken-off branch were blood. And the smears on the rest of the driftwood were also blood.
If this was Polly’s blood, then Richard realised that someone else must have hidden the branch after she’d fallen to her death.
In fact, Richard realised, the find was even more significant than that. His suspicions about Polly’s death had been right all along.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Polly Carter didn’t jump. She was murdered.’
Giving the branch to Fidel so he could bag it for processing, Richard explained his theory.
‘Putting aside the question of how a piece of driftwood ended up near the top of a cliff, let’s see what this means. Polly argued with her sister in the garden, all the witnesses agree on that. And Polly then said she was going to commit suicide. Well, we only have her sister Claire’s word for that, but we’ve got no reason to disbelieve her for the moment, so let’s say that that’s what happened. In a wild fury, Polly turned to Claire and said she was going to kill herself.
‘Then, rather than just jump to her death from the top of the cliff, she made sure she came down the first flight of stairs and turned the corner so she was now out of sight of her sister. Which brings us to the cut in her arm.
‘Because we’ve almost certainly found the piece of wood that cut her—I’m sure we can all agree on that. So, if this were suicide, Polly must have found the piece of driftwood lying here. She must then have picked it up, and then, for reasons known only to herself, she must have stabbed that sharp bit of the branch into her skin and ripped a vicious cut down her forearm. Which doesn’t seem likely, does it?’
‘It doesn’t, sir,’ Fidel agreed.
Richard indicated the break in the bushes where Polly had fallen to her death.
‘And we know that Polly was bleeding quite heavily when she went over the edge. There’s blood in the dust here where she fell.’ Richard then pointed a good twenty or thirty steps further down the staircase at the bush where they’d found the bloody piece of driftwood. ‘So how did she manage to get to that bush all that way down there, hide the branch in the bushes, and then get back up here without leaving a single drop of blood on the steps in between? And if that’s impossible—which frankly it is, if you ask me—just why would she self-harm herself with a branch, go down the steps, hide the branch, then come back up to here, and only then jump to her death?’
Fidel and Camille could see the logic of what Richard was saying.
‘Which means we’ve