Death Knocks Twice - Robert Thorogood

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inside, and then committed suicide by shooting himself with the handgun.

      Before Richard rolled the body over to reveal the dead man’s face, he briefly noticed that the man lay on the floor directly between the shower and the drain that was set into the centre of the mosaic-tiled room. And although the water from the shower had run down to the old man on its way to the metal-grilled hole in the floor, his body had formed something of a barrier, and the water had gone around him on either side on its way to the drain. In other words, Richard realised, the shower hadn’t been running long enough to really drench the man’s clothes and start seeping underneath the body as it ran away. The area of floor that lay directly between the body and the drain was still bone dry.

      This briefly puzzled Richard. After all, it made sense that the man would have turned on the shower before committing suicide. It was a well-known – if somewhat macabre – fact that most suicides were carried out with some consideration for those who were about to discover the body. This was why so many gun suicides happened in bathrooms. The person about to commit suicide knows that bathrooms are altogether easier to clean of blood than any of the other rooms in a house. And the fact that this man had turned on the shower and positioned himself by the drain before he shot himself suggested that this suicide was no different. The man had wanted to make sure that whatever blood he created with his death would be sluiced away afterwards.

      But if the shower had been turned on before the man had taken his own life, the tiles should have been wet all the way between the shower and the drain. After all, while it was plausible that the body became a barrier to the water after it had collapsed to the floor, it didn’t seem possible that no water at all had made it to the drain before the man had killed himself. And yet, the tiles between the dead body and the drain were entirely dry. Maybe there was some kind of timer on the shower that had turned on after the man had killed himself, Richard wondered to himself. Either way, Richard filed away the puzzle of whether the shower had been turned on ante or post mortem for later consideration.

      It was time to turn the body over and discover the man’s identity.

      Richard took hold of the body’s shoulders, and Camille looked over at Lucy.

      ‘I think you should leave.’

      ‘I want to see his face.’

      ‘But we don’t know how damaged the body is.’

      ‘I don’t care,’ Lucy said desperately. ‘I have to see.’

      Camille looked at Richard. He nodded. It was okay by him.

      With a grunt of effort – cadavers were always surprisingly heavy – Richard turned the body over, but he and Camille needn’t have worried about gore. There was only the smallest of blooms of blood seeping onto the man’s grey shirt above the heart area. But, once again, Richard noticed that although the back of the body was wet with water, the clothes to the front of the corpse – where the body had been touching the floor – were still bone dry. It was looking increasingly as though the man was dead and on the tiles before the shower had been turned on.

      As for the body itself, Richard could see that the man’s face was hollow-cheeked and craggy-lined from age. And although his skin was greyish-white, his cheeks and nose were a purple starburst of burst veins. He had clearly been a drinker. Adding to the impression of an old man who didn’t look after himself was an unruly pair of grey eyebrows and a long beard that seemed almost yellow rather than white, and which was very distinctly nicotine-stained around the mouth – from the cigarettes, Richard could smell from the man’s clothes, that he smoked.

      ‘It’s him,’ Lucy said simply.

      ‘This is the man you saw stalking you this morning?’

      ‘It is.’

      ‘And who you then chased into the jungle?’

      ‘That’s right,’ Lucy said, but Richard could see that something was making her frown.

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Yes. It’s definitely him. It’s the man I chased into the jungle.’

      Lucy was still troubled by something.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ Richard asked.

      Lucy kept on looking at the man on the ground.

      ‘Ms Beaumont, what is it?’

      ‘It’s just, I don’t know who he is.’

      ‘How do you mean?’

      ‘Well, I only got the briefest of glimpses of him before now. But I always reckoned I’d maybe recognise him if I ever got up close.’

      ‘And you don’t?’

      ‘I don’t,’ Lucy said. ‘In fact, I’ve no idea who that man is at all.’

      Richard looked at Camille.

      And then he looked from Camille back to Lucy.

      ‘Then who the hell is he?’

      ‘You’re sure you don’t recognise him?’ Richard asked.

      Lucy was troubled as she looked at the old man.

      ‘I don’t. But he’s definitely the man I saw this morning.’

      ‘Then, is there anyone else at the plantation who might recognise him?’

      ‘I don’t think there are any workers on the plantation at the moment.’

      ‘There aren’t?’ Richard asked, surprised.

      ‘It’s the wrong time in the growing season. But the rest of my family should be up at the house.’

      Richard looked at Camille, who got the message.

      ‘I’ll accompany you back to the house,’ she said. ‘We’ll need to bring whoever we can down here to see if they can identify the body.’

      ‘Of course,’ Lucy said.

      ‘And call Dwayne and Fidel, Camille,’ Richard said as Camille led Lucy out of the room. ‘Pull them off the bootleg rum case. We’re going to need them and the Crime Scene Kit up here pronto.’

      Once Camille and Lucy had left, Richard started to work the scene. First he took stock of the room. It was about forty feet across, entirely circular, and the walls and floor were constructed of stone. And from the way that the stone on the walls and floor was worn away, Richard could tell that the building was very old. Halfway around the room, there was an old metal-framed window to let light in, and on the far side of the room there was a slatted bench with a neatly-stacked pile of white towels waiting to be used.

      The shower area itself consisted of two tall sheets of glass, one either side of a mosaic-tiled area where the shower and control unit were.

      Richard went to the centre of the room and looked up at the cone-shaped roof as it rose high above his head. He could see that the wide opening at the very top of the cone had been blocked off and there was now just an old metal vent of some sort. There was no way a human could have come in or out of the building through the ‘chimney’.

      Richard had only seen the one bullet wound in the man’s chest and yet he’d definitely heard two shots being fired when he’d been in the jungle, so he decided to see if he could discover what had happened to the other bullet.

      Richard ‘walked the grid’ of the floor and soon found two bullet casings where they’d skittered to a stop on the tiles about five feet from the body. So if two bullets had been fired – as the two bullet casings suggested – where was the second bullet? Richard returned to the body, and it was only as he crouched down and really started checking it over that he found the second wound.

      When he unclasped the dead man’s right hand from the handle of the

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