Роберт Торогуд – The Killing Of Polly Carter (страница 1)
ROBERT THOROGOOD is the creator of the hit BBC One TV series,
He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1972. When he was 10-years old, he read his first proper novel – Agatha Christie’s
He now lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire with his wife, children and an increasingly cranky Bengal cat called Daniel.
ISBN: 978-1-474-03809-6
THE KILLING OF POLLY CARTER
© 2015 Robert Thorogood
Published in Great Britain 2015
by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollins
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
Version: 2018-07-23
For Charlie and James
Table of Contents
Detective Inspector Richard Poole sat on the verandah of his beachside shack looking up at the cloudless Caribbean sky in inarticulate outrage.
A passing parrot had just crapped in his cup of tea.
It didn’t seem possible, but Richard had watched the little bugger fly in over the sea and defecate in mid-air, the little ball of released guano flying in a perfect parabola only to land in his English Breakfast Tea with an accuracy, Richard realised, that Barnes Wallis could only have dreamed of.
In a spasm of disgust, Richard sloshed the contents of his china cup over the balustrade and tried to return his attention to the book he’d been reading. It was an old hardback he’d found at the back of the police station called
But it was no good, Richard couldn’t settle back into his book, and instead he found himself glancing nervously back up at the sky every few seconds. After all, what if another parrot came for him out of the sun? Richard sighed heavily to himself. Honestly, when you got down to it, the Caribbean was a bloody nightmare from start to finish.
It didn’t help that he had already been in a bad mood that morning, even before the aerial bombardment. This was because Richard had a secret. A deep and dark secret he’d not even dared mention to his team yet. In fact, as he went through to the little galley kitchen at the back of his shack to wash up his tea things, Richard decided that there surely couldn’t have been another person on the whole island of Saint-Marie who was having as miserable a morning as him.
But he was wrong. There was someone.
This was because, just a few miles further along the coastline, a woman called Polly Carter was sitting in her kitchen wearing a bright yellow summer dress, drinking a freshly pressed glass of mango juice, and smoking a cigarette—and although she didn’t know it yet, she only had a few minutes left to live.
Polly was forty years old and a fashion model famous the world over for a look that in person could come across as gawky inelegance, but, in photographs, translated into a gap-toothed beauty. Her face had adorned billboards, magazine covers, and a rock group had once written a chart-topping record lionising her looks. Not that Polly took much notice of the hubbub that surrounded her life any more. She’d been trawling up and down catwalks since she was twenty-two years old, she’d earned more money than she’d ever dreamed—had spent even more—and all she wanted now was a break from it all. Which, ironically, she was about to get.
The door to the kitchen banged open, and Polly’s wheelchair-bound sister Claire was pushed into the room by her nurse, Sophie.
Claire and Polly were twins, although Claire was the older of the two by a few minutes. This should have created a special bond between the two sisters, but Claire was one of those older siblings who felt that it was her seniority that defined her entire relationship with her sister. So, because Polly was naturally impetuous, irresponsible, and had a wicked sense of humour, Claire was superior, overly responsible and felt that life was nothing to laugh about. This outlook was sharpened further by the fact that, following a riding accident ten years ago, Claire no longer had the use of her legs. It was no consolation to Claire that although she and her sister were non-identical, she was blessed with an uncanny beauty very similar to her famous sister’s. But then, as Claire would remark to anyone who cared to listen, her and her sister Polly’s supposed good looks only ever seemed to become apparent in fashion photographs, and who ever took fashion photographs of a cripple?
‘Well this is a first, you’re already up,’ Claire said to Polly as Sophie finished pushing her over to the breakfast bar.
‘Is that so surprising?’ Polly asked, briefly thrown by her sister’s tone.
‘Well, you don’t normally get up before lunchtime, so yes, I’d say it was a surprise.’
Polly was affronted.
‘I don’t just laze about all day, you know.’
‘Oh you don’t, do you?’ Claire said with a disdainful laugh, and Polly looked at her sister a long moment before—very slowly—plucking another cigarette from the battered pack on the table and lighting it.
Once she’d taken a long, rasping drag from her cigarette, Polly said, ‘Look, if you must know, I only got up this morning so I could spend some time with you.’
‘Ha! Well, that’s a first,’ Claire said, still unable to take her sister at all seriously.
Claire’s nurse, Sophie Wessel, was used to how Claire bickered with her sister Polly—and vice versa—so she tuned the two women out while she made some coffee for herself and Claire. It wasn’t in her job description to make drinks for her client, but Sophie had soon learnt that Claire was one of those people who not only expected her nurse to push her wheelchair and help with all of the tasks she wasn’t capable of doing herself, but she also felt that Sophie should act as her personal assistant and lackey.
Once Sophie had pushed the plunger down on the cafetière, she turned back to the room only to see Polly wheeling Claire out of the kitchen door and into the garden.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ Sophie asked the sisters before they left the room.
‘No thanks,’ Claire said. ‘Polly says she wants to take me for a walk in the garden.’
‘You do?’ Sophie said, surprised. She and Claire had been house guests of Polly’s for the last ten days, and Polly hadn’t once offered to push her sister’s wheelchair in all that time.