Death Knocks Twice. Robert Thorogood

got some loose change in his pockets, and plenty of it is UK currency.’

      ‘He’s got British coins in his pockets?’

      ‘He has, sir.’

      Dwayne handed over a small see-through evidence bag to his boss that was full of coins.

      ‘But I also found a receipt in his back pocket you might want to look at.’

      Dwayne handed over an evidence bag that contained a cheap till receipt with blue ink so faded that it was hard to read.

      ‘You need to turn it over,’ Dwayne suggested.

      Richard turned the evidence bag over and could see that on the other side of the receipt, someone had scribbled ‘11am’ in biro.

      ‘It says ‘11am’,’ Richard said. ‘He was killed just after 11am.’

      ‘Suggesting to me, Chief, that our victim was perhaps here for a pre-arranged meeting.’

      ‘Now that’s interesting,’ Richard said, and handed the evidence bag to Camille for her to inspect. ‘So this murder was possibly premeditated. Have we really got nothing beyond a few British coins to help us work out who this man was?’

      ‘I’m sorry, Chief. Although the victim’s got a pretty distinctive scar on the forefinger of his left hand.’

      Dwayne crouched down and turned the victim’s left hand over, indicating an old scar that ran along the victim’s forefinger. It was white, ridged, and a good two inches long.

      ‘I see,’ Richard said. ‘So, apart from a scar on his left hand, a few British coins, and a cryptic till receipt with “11am” written on it, we don’t know who the victim is?’

      ‘That’s about it, sir,’ Dwayne agreed.

      ‘So what’s the problem?’ Camille asked, reminding Richard of what he’d said only a few minutes earlier.

      ‘It’s this window,’ Richard said as he led Dwayne and Camille over to the little metal-framed window on the far wall of the room. ‘Or to be more precise, this window, the vent in the ceiling, and that door,’ he said, pointing at the ceiling and broken-in door in turn as he spoke.

      ‘Why’s that?’ Dwayne asked.

      ‘Tell me what you see,’ Richard said as he indicated the window.

      ‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, buying himself time, ‘unless this is a trick question, it’s a window.’

      ‘You’re right, Dwayne. It’s a window. Camille?’

      Camille’s instincts were already telling her where Richard was going with this. So she got out a pair of evidence gloves, snapped them on, and started checking out the window frame. She could see that it was fixed solidly to the stone casement, and the glass was held in place with old putty that had crumbled in places but had clearly not been tampered with in any way. But she knew the real test would be the latch that kept the window locked shut, and she gently touched it with her fingers. It didn’t move. In fact, she could see that the window’s latch was jammed tightly into the window frame.

      What was more, Camille could see that the metal lever that allowed the window to open and close had an old butterfly screw on it that was tightly screwed down as well. Giving the butterfly screw a hard twist to the left, she unscrewed it enough that she could finally open the window. She then stuck her head outside. There was an undisturbed flower bed directly underneath the window with only a few weeds in, and the rest of the area behind the shower room was concreted over.

      She then closed the window again, reset the catch in the window frame and re-locked the butterfly screw on the lever.

      ‘Okay,’ she pronounced, ‘so the window was locked. And it can only be locked from the inside.’

      ‘Precisely,’ Richard said, pleased that Camille had also worked it out.

      Camille crossed to the centre of the room and looked up at the ceiling high above them.

      ‘And there’s no way in or out of this room through the roof. Not even with that vent built into the top.’

      ‘Agreed,’ Richard said. ‘It’s far too small.’

      Camille led over to the main door.

      ‘And this door is seriously old, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You couldn’t even begin to tamper with the hinges, or get around it or under it in any way.’

      ‘Quite so,’ Richard said.

      Camille inspected the thick iron bolt that ran across the back of the door. It was about three feet long, and was fixed very firmly inside a solid housing made of iron. And it was obvious that neither the bolt nor housing had been tampered with any more than the hinges of the door had been.

      So Camille turned her attention to the door frame. It was just as solid as the door, and the lock worked by sliding the iron bolt across so it slotted into a deep hole that had been drilled directly into the door frame. She could see that the iron bolt had ripped through the wooden frame when Richard had smashed the door open with his sledgehammer.

      ‘As for the iron bolt,’ Camille said, ‘it was very clearly slid across when you bashed the door open. You can see where the bolt has torn through the wood of the door frame. And that’s why we’ve got a problem, isn’t it?’

      ‘Got it in one, Camille,’ Richard said returning to the centre room. ‘Because this room is entirely made of stone, and there are only three ways a human could have got out of it after the murder – those being through the window on the far side, out through the roof, or through this door. The ceiling is impossible, and both the door and the window were locked from the inside.’

      ‘Oh, I see,’ Dwayne said, understanding finally dawning on him. ‘That’s the problem!’

      ‘It is, Dwayne,’ Richard agreed.

      The three Police officers looked at each other.

      ‘That’s quite a problem,’ Dwayne said on all of their behalves.

      ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Richard agreed. ‘Because, seeing as we found no-one else in here when we broke in, just how did our killer commit murder and then escape from a locked room?’

CHAPTER THREE

      When Richard and his team returned to the Police station, he set them to work. Dwayne was tasked with processing the physical evidence. In particular, Richard wanted him to lift whatever fingerprints he could identify on the gun that had very possibly been used to kill the victim – and the two shell casings they’d found near the victim. As for Fidel, he’d stayed at the plantation to create plaster casts of the tyre prints he’d found behind the farm buildings, so he returned to the Police station after everyone else. Once back, he laid out the three chunky blocks of white plaster of Paris on his desk. Each one was about a foot long – and six inches deep, and six inches wide – and the surface of each of the casts was covered in grit and dirt. Fidel set to cleaning them up with a make-up brush. Once that was done, Richard tasked him with trying to use the tyre casts to identify the make and model of the vehicle from a Caribbean-wide database of tyre prints.

      As for Richard, seeing as the victim had been found with British currency in his pocket – and Lucy had said that the man had been lurking up at the plantation for the last few weeks – he decided to pull the border records for all of the Brits who’d arrived at the Saint-Marie airport in the last eight weeks. But when he spoke to the Head of Security at the airport, he discovered that it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The man informed Richard that maybe as many as five thousand British tourists had arrived on the island in the previous eight weeks, and while the airport had CCTV footage of everyone as they made their way through passport control, the only way of doing any kind of visual search for the victim would be to sit down