LITMIR.BIZ

      After Richard had first arrived on Saint-Marie, it had taken him quite a few months to get his head around the fact that there was a live volcano on the southern half of the island. Admittedly, Mount Esmée was such a huge geological feature that it could be seen from everywhere on the island, but it seemed so improbable to Richard that people would share an island with an active volcano that he’d presumed that, at some level, it wasn’t real. Even when he heard about the Great Eruption of 1979, which had apparently shot lava hundreds of feet into the air and sent a terrifying pyroclastic flow down the side of the mountain at a hundred miles an hour – wiping out dozens of homes and killing 34 people – he remained in denial.

      Now, as Camille drove the Police jeep up the tight hairpin bends towards the Beaumont Plantation, Richard found himself suffering an existential crisis. He was sitting in the sweltering heat of a vehicle that he knew hadn’t been serviced for over a decade while a Frenchwoman was driving it ever-higher up a real life volcano. What had gone wrong with his life?

      ‘Watch out!’ Richard shouted as an oncoming motorbike took a wide line around a tight bend in the road.

      ‘Will you please calm down,’ Camille said.

      Richard could sort of see Camille’s point. After all, she was an excellent driver and he knew it probably didn’t help that he kept shouting ‘Brake! Brake! Brake!’ as they approached every corner, so he instead decided to grab hold of the dashboard and not let go.

      He was still holding onto the dashboard when, ten minutes of stomach-sloshing fear later, Camille brought the Police jeep to a juddering halt by a row of wooden farm buildings half way up the mountain. Richard took a moment to calm himself. It seemed even hotter – if that were possible – this high up the mountain. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze, and all he could hear was the ticking of the jeep’s diesel engine as it started to cool down. Richard looked through the windscreen and saw that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Typical, he thought to himself. He was about to get roasted by the scorching heat again. With a weary sigh, he opened the passenger-side door and stepped out of the jeep.

      It started raining. And not just any rain, either. Richard found himself standing in a full-on torrential downpour. He looked up at the sky, but couldn’t see anything close to a cloud either directly above his head or even nearby. He was always prepared though, so he went to the boot of the jeep, grabbed his emergency umbrella and put it up with a satisfying whomp. There, he thought to himself, that was better.

      It stopped raining.

      Only now did Camille step out of the jeep, and Richard had a brief out of body experience where he could see that his partner, Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey – who was wearing dark green cotton trousers and a short-sleeved checked shirt – was now standing next to a pasty-faced middle-aged Englishman who was wearing a black suit, black brogues and was holding a funeral umbrella in the bright sunshine.

      ‘It’s not raining, sir,’ Camille said.

      ‘I know that, Camille,’ Richard said, trying to keep his dignity intact as he lowered his umbrella and returned it to the boot of the jeep. There still wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but Richard knew that he hadn’t imagined the brief tropical downpour. His woollen suit was damp with water, and he could see that the dry mud he was standing on was now covered in little craters where the raindrops had drilled hard into the ground. When would the tropics ever make any sense to him?

      ‘Okay, sir, so what do you know about the Beaumont family?’ Camille asked her boss as they watched Lucy park her car a little way away.

      ‘Not much,’ Richard replied, trying to ignore the fact that his suit was now steaming. ‘Other than the fact that they’re very rich.’

      ‘Very rich and extremely secretive. Sir, could I say something?’

      ‘Of course. What is it?’

      ‘You seem to be on fire.’

      ‘It’s not fire, Camille. It’s steam.’

      ‘Oh, I see. You’re steaming, sir.’

      ‘It’s the rain in my suit. The sun’s making it evaporate, okay? It’s just basic physics.’

      ‘Of course it is, sir.’

      Ignoring the smirk on his partner’s face, Richard turned and looked at the plantation buildings as Lucy headed over. There were old barns, workshops, and other structures all made from the same grey stone, and they were all arranged around an ancient cobblestoned yard. In fact, if it wasn’t for the palm trees and jungle pressing in on all sides, Richard could imagine the farm buildings fitting just as well into a village scene back in Dorset. Oh, and the active volcano looming above the plantation, Richard noted to himself – that was the other clue that he wasn’t on a farm in Dorset.

      As Lucy reached the Police, Richard took charge.

      ‘We’d better not waste any time,’ he said. ‘So can you tell us what you saw and when?’

      ‘I’ll try,’ she said, nervously. ‘But I don’t really know where to start.’

      ‘That’s okay,’ Camille said, knowing that if her boss was all clanking metal cogs, she had to be the oil. ‘Just tell us what happened in your own words.’

      ‘Well, I suppose it started a couple of weeks ago,’ Lucy said. ‘And I didn’t know it was happening at first. If you see what I mean. It was just a feeling I got. That someone was watching me. You know, that feeling where your skin prickles?’

      ‘How do you mean?’ Camille asked.

      ‘You know, when your skin creeps because you think someone’s looking at you? Well, I had that feeling a couple of weeks ago. When I was down here. But I couldn’t work out if anyone was actually looking at me. It was just this sensation I had that I was being watched. So I told myself I must be imagining it – even though it’s happened quite a few times since then. Mostly when I’m down by these buildings. Or out in the coffee fields.’ Here, Lucy indicated the land as it sloped down the mountain from the courtyard, and Richard could see that the whole hillside was covered in neat rows of densely-packed bushes, each about ten feet high.

      ‘Oh, are those coffee bushes?’ Richard asked.

      ‘They are.’

      ‘Where the coffee berries grow?’

      ‘We call them cherries, but yes, that’s where they grow.’

      ‘I

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