LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Your face went very red, sir,’ Fidel said.

      ‘Are you sure you don’t want to take your suit jacket off?’ Dwayne asked.

      ‘Camille!’ Richard barked, not wanting to get sidetracked again by his team’s desire to get him into cooler clothes. ‘How are you getting on with identifying our victim?’

      ‘Well, sir,’ Camille said, ‘no-one’s contacted us or any of the other government agencies since this morning to report anyone missing.’

      ‘What about hospitals?’

      ‘None of them has lost any of their patients.’

      ‘Then what about hotels? He must have been staying somewhere at nights.’

      ‘Agreed, sir. But there are no reports of missing guests from hotels, either.’

      ‘So who the hell is he?’ Richard asked, his anger driving him up out of his seat. ‘I mean, come on, everyone! Theories?’

      ‘Well, sir,’ Fidel said, ‘he didn’t look too wealthy, did he?’

      ‘I’d agree with that.’

      ‘And the empty bottle of vodka we found in the clearing was pretty cheap.’

      ‘Yes. That’s true.’

      ‘And, without wishing to be indelicate, sir, he didn’t seem in the best condition, did he? Although, I suppose he’d been spending most of his time in a jungle for the last few weeks.’

      ‘Assuming Lucy Beaumont was telling us the truth,’ Camille said. ‘After all, she’s the only member of the family who ever saw the man.’

      ‘Yes,’ Richard agreed. ‘Assuming she was telling the truth. All of which rather begs the question: what exactly was our victim attempting to achieve up at the Plantation? Was it Lucy he was spying on, or was he up to something else, and it’s just one of those things that only Lucy saw him? Actually,’ Richard said, a new thought occurring to him. ‘While we’re on the subject of Lucy, can you fill me in a bit on the family? What do we know about them?’

      There was an awkward pause while Camille, Fidel and Dwayne all looked at each other, not sure what to say.

      ‘Oh? Is there a problem?’

      ‘Well, Chief, they’re not a very well-liked family on the island,’ Dwayne said.

      ‘And why’s that?’

      ‘None of the old families who used slaves are much liked, sir.’

      This comment caught Richard by surprise. He wasn’t so naive as to be unaware of both Britain and France’s appalling history of using African slaves to work on their plantations in the Caribbean. However, since Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833 – over 180 years ago – he’d not noticed much in the way of current tensions around the subject.

      In fact, as a white Brit who was a guest on Saint-Marie, one of the first things Richard had done when he’d arrived was go to the library in Honoré and ask to borrow a book that would teach him the history of the island, with particular reference to how Saint-Marie had been treated by the British government. It seemed the least he could do as a Brit visiting a former colony. Richard was unsurprised – but nonetheless still chastened – to read about how deprivations, abuse and what could only be called outright kidnap and murder had been the basis of so many families’ wealth back in the UK during this period of over one hundred years.

      As he looked at his team now and saw how grave and focused they were, he realised how wrong he’d been. The tensions were still there. It’s just that they were beneath the surface.

      ‘Go on,’ he said.

      ‘Well, Chief,’ Dwayne said, ‘there are so few families left who go back to the bad old days. But those few who are still here, and are still running the same businesses now as they were then, well, they’ve got blood on their hands.’

      ‘Yes, I can see that,’ Richard said.

      Dwayne briefly smiled at his boss’s words. For all of Richard’s many faults – and there was no doubting that he had many faults – his team knew that he treated everyone equally, irrespective of the colour of their skin. Admittedly, this was mainly because Richard presumed that everyone was going to be a bitter disappointment to him before he’d even met them, but his team had always acknowledged that he was at least colour-blind in his misanthropy.

      ‘So you’re saying that the Beaumonts still have enemies on the island?’

      ‘I don’t know about that,’ Dwayne said. ‘But although there’s plenty of islanders who work on their plantation when it comes to harvest time, there’s very few who are happy working there full time.’

      ‘Yes. We saw that today, didn’t we? There was no-one else up at the plantation apart from the family.’

      ‘Exactly.’

      ‘So what do we know about the members of the family?’

      Here, Camille got up some handwritten notes from the mess of her desk.

      ‘Okay, so Hugh Beaumont is fifty years old, is solely in charge of the plantation, and from the few enquiries I’ve made, he’s considered a pretty fair boss. Unlike his father William, who he took over from when he died back in 2001.’

      ‘You can say that again,’ Dwayne said. ‘William was a tyrant.’

      ‘He was?’

      ‘Sure was, Chief. The man was bad news. After Mount Esmée erupted back in 1979 and the coffee fields were wiped out, he drove his workforce to breaking point getting them to clear away the ash, rework the soil and replant the coffee plants. And all along he promised them a serious bonus if they got the fields ready again by the next growing season. When they’d completed the task – and in time – he gave them their bonus, which turned out to be a 10-kilogram bag of coffee each. It was a scandal at the time.’

      ‘Dwayne’s right,’ Fidel said. ‘My mum talks about that winter after the eruption. It was really tough on the whole island. Everyone had to pull together.’

      ‘And William Beaumont took advantage of all of the island’s goodwill,’ Dwayne said. ‘I remember there was an accident one day. One of the pile-drivers that was being used to put in wooden posts for the coffee plants crushed one of the workers, killing him. William didn’t even allow anyone from the plantation time off to attend the funeral. It was all about getting the place back up and running again.’

      ‘So William was a nasty piece of work,’ Richard said. ‘But you’re saying he died in 2001, and his son Hugh is less of a tyrant?’

      ‘Got it in one,’ Dwayne agreed. ‘As far as I know, Hugh runs the place pretty fairly. I’ve got a few mates who do seasonal work for him. He pays on time. And as long as you work hard, he doesn’t mind too much if you arrive a little bit late or leave a bit early.’

      ‘So he’s one of the more acceptable Beaumonts? Could we say that about him?’

      ‘More acceptable,’ Dwayne agreed, making it clear from the way he leaned on the word ‘more’ that it was all relative.

      ‘Then what about Sylvie Beaumont, his wife?’

      ‘Well, she’s interesting,’ Camille said, getting up a Saint-Marie newspaper article from 1991 on her computer monitor. ‘She’s the same age as Hugh – fifty years old – and her engagement to him made the Saint-Marie Times twenty-five years ago. In this article here it says she was originally from Maldon in Essex, and that she met Hugh in a bar on Saint-Marie when she was over here working as a holiday rep for Club Caribbean.’

      The Police knew Club Caribbean well. It was full of twenty- to thirty-year olds who came to the island to have ‘fun’ which, Richard had too often had cause to notice, seemed to involve ingesting

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