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 vast amounts of liquid before ejecting an equivalent amount again only a few hours later – which hardly seemed ‘fun’ to him.
‘Ha!’ Richard said out loud. ‘I knew there was something about her accent that didn’t ring true.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, let me put it this way, I don’t think the matriarch of Beaumont Manor who we met this morning spoke in quite the same plummy accent when she was a holiday rep from Maldon in Essex.’
‘And you should know,’ Camille added, ‘that she seems to be in the newspapers every month. She’s chair of this charity, sits on the board of that marine preserve, you know? She’s a do-gooder.’
‘A do-gooder who’s vain enough to want everyone to see just how much do-gooding she’s up to. Very interesting. Good work, Camille. Then what of their children? In particular, can you explain why everyone speaks with a British accent except for Tom?’
‘Well, that’s easy to explain, sir. Tom speaks with a Saint-Marie accent because he went to Notre Dame School here on Saint-Marie.’
‘And Lucy and Matthew didn’t?’
‘Lucy also went to Notre Dame, but obviously decided not to pick up an island accent. As for Matthew, he was sent to boarding school in the UK. But going back to Tom, he left school with excellent grades, and has just finished an undergraduate course studying Agriculture at the University of Miami.’
‘Which is hardly the impression he gave to me this morning.’
‘You mean with his cannabis T-shirt and island attitude?’
‘Exactly. So why is a bright young man with academic qualifications pretending to be a counter-culture stoner, do you think?’
A silence descended on the room as Richard’s team all stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
Eventually, Dwayne spoke.
‘Did you just say “counter-culture stoner”, Chief?’
‘Yes,’ Richard said, somewhat irked. ‘I’m not entirely out of touch with street argot, you know.’
‘No, sir,’ Camille said, trying to stifle a laugh.
‘What’s that, Camille?’
‘Oh, nothing sir. Just caught something in my throat.’
Fidel stepped into the breach.
‘And sir,’ he said. ‘You should know. I rang a cousin of mine when we got back to the station. I reckoned Tom would have been at Notre Dame at the same time as him. Anyway, my cousin said that Tom was one of the most popular kids in his year. He was clever, but he didn’t make a big deal about it. He played football, but he didn’t join any of the teams. He did his own thing. Oh, and he liked to party, and party hard. That was the other thing my cousin said.’
‘So he wasn’t
