Thanks to all who have reviewed, favourited and followed this story. I apologise for the delay in updates, I've actually had about three quarters of this written for a while but struggled with the direction I wanted to take it. Hopefully I shouldn't take so long next time! Hope you enjoy this next chapter and thank you for your patience.


Chapter Seven

Shock Death at La Petit Papillon.

Citizens of Saint-Marie were left stunned yesterday as news broke of the death of one of the island's most famous residents, Renee Monaghan. While the circumstances behind the death remain obscure, sources at the scene said that while it is being treated as suspicious, the Honore police force currently have no suspects.

Monaghan, 53, rose to fame as a celebrated chef and for the past three years has been working as head chef at La Petit Papillon under owner Emilie Beauchamp. Ms Beauchamp, 34, was seen to be highly distressed yesterday morning outside the restaurant where the body was discovered although it is common knowledge that the relationship between chef and owner has been strained at times. With a waiting list eight months long, who knows what effect this latest blow will have on the success of Ms Beauchamp's business...


The morning after the murder, Camille drops the paper on her desk and rests her forehead in her hands, glaring down at the bold type of the Honore Herald.

"Tabloids, eh?" Dwayne says from his desk where he has his own copy open to a double page spread cataloging Renee's glittering career. "One sniff of blood in the water and they're all over it."

"Sources at the scene... sources at the scene, what sources?" Camille says stabbing the paper with a long finger. "Who were they talking to?"

"Could be anyone Sarge. There was a bit of a crowd when we left. Any member of public could have overheard someone speaking."

Camille sighs. "Right. We could have done with more time before the press got hold of this but okay, this is what we've got." She stands up and walks out from behind the desk, shoes clicking as she walks. Fidel looks up from his computer where he is typing up the witness statements and follows her movements as she stops in front of the whiteboard where they document their cases.

"Emilie Beauchamp, victim's boss, found the body at around 9am, no apparent motive."

"But by her own account and this-" Fidel grabs the Herald and waves it in the air before dropping it into the bin by the side of his desk, "-she and the victim had their differences."

"Yes, arguments about the running of the restaurant, menus, all business, nothing personal," Camille says. "From what I can gather, it's standard restaurant stuff."

"And Renee's fame meant the restaurant was making a huge profit. Waiting list a mile long," adds Dwayne. With a strained groan he stands from his chair and makes his way over to the water cooler in the corner of the room, pouring himself a cup and gulping it down.

"Right, right so no motive there that we can see. Next-" she says, stabbing the board with the marker pen. "Alfie Pollard. The victim's partner, been together 15 years, never married, no children. Has he been interviewed yet?"

Fidel shakes his head. "He was working in Saint-Louis this week. When we managed to get hold of him, he said he'd be back as soon as he could. In fact," he glances up at the clock on the wall, "he should've here by now. He's supposed to be calling in here before going home."

Camille nods. "Right. We'll conduct a quick interview when he gets here. Although God knows what kind of state he'll be in." Her mind shoots back, as it has so many times over the last couple of days, to her own heart-stopping fear and grief during those hours when she thought she would have to say goodbye to Richard. She could only imagine how much worse it would have been if her nightmares had become reality. "How was he on the phone?"

"As you'd expect. Shocked. Distraught."

They all fall into silence for a moment, the quiet punctuated only by the gentle whir of the ceiling fan and the distant murmur of cars on the road outside. Dwayne, without his own romantic attachment to muse upon, breaks the silence before Fidel and Camille can break themselves free of their own dark imaginings.

"I'm going to go out into town this afternoon, talk to some people, find out if anyone knows of any enemies she had, anything that's happened recently with our victim."

"You won't find anything," a deep voice comes from the door and as one the three police officers' heads snap to face the man standing in the doorway.


...An only child, Renee Monaghan was born in Honore and from an early age displayed a yearning for success and a determination to make her name known. Not much is known about her early life other than the death of both her parents in a car crash when Miss Monaghan was just fifteen. While other teenagers may have retreated into themselves, this early tragedy only seemed to fuel the young cooking enthusiast's drive to succeed and while completing her studies she held down a part time job in the Lime Tree, a restaurant owned by friends of her parents who guided her in her culinary ambitions.

Miss Monaghan, who had been in a steady relationship for over a decade with local successful businessman Alfred Pollard at the time of her death, made a touching tribute to her parents upon receiving her Michelin Star last year, calling them her guiding lights...


The stranger is tall, wearing loose linen trousers and a white suit shirt with the sleeves rolled up past the elbows. His trousers are dusty from the road outside, sand and dirt kicked up by the Caribbean breeze clinging onto the material. Red-rimmed eyes and blotchy cheeks speak of recent tears not washed away properly. He steps inside and his face falls into shadow as he moves out of the morning sun.

Camille steps forward smoothly, extending her hand. "Mr Pollard?"

Automatically his hand comes up to meet hers. "Alfie. Yes."

"We're sorry for your loss," Camille says and her heart squeezes at the raw grief written across the man's face. She wants to tell him she knows how he feels. She wants to share the hollowness and despair she experienced when she thought, however briefly, that she would never see the man she loved roll his eyes or blow gently on a cup of tea again. But grief is a private thing and the truth is that she doesn't know how he feels. Nobody ever knows how another experiences loss and she knows that no matter what she says, he is alone in his heartache and only time can heal that. Time and justice for Renee's killer, which is something she can help with.

Alfie swallows, his Adam's apple rises and falls with the motion and he shakes her hand weakly. His hand is cold despite the heat outside reaching into the low fifties centigrade.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I wish we didn't have to meet."

Camille nods with a grimace. "I understand. I'm Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey, this is Detective Sergeant Fidel Best and Detective Constable Dwayne Myers."

Alfie nods hello to each of them and folds his arms across his broad chest, curling in on himself like a leaf drying out in the sun. He looks around him, shifting from foot to foot, seemingly unsure of what to do or say. His eyes, forest green, momentarily rest on the whiteboard which holds a photograph of Renee, smiling outside the restaurant in the centre. Camille thanks God they have not yet put a photograph of the crime scene up or, worse yet, the body. She can only imagine the distress that would have caused.

"Thank you for coming in," Camille says as Fidel rises to turn on the kettle. Before Richard came to the island, there was no kettle in the station, something which Richard vociferously protested for the first few weeks before realising that no amount of noise about tea being a basic human right would make anyone else in the station care about the lack of hot beverages available. Shortly after his complaints died down the new kettle appeared in the station and the receipt appeared in Richard's expenses claim. Now it is almost a habit, ingrained by Richard's frequent insistence that it was only polite, for one of them to put the kettle on whenever there is a visitor at the station. In the past Camille had wondered how much electricity the English used nationwide boiling the kettle.

Alfie's eyes have not moved from Renee's happy face as he clears his throat. "I'm sorry. I don't know how these things go. I don't know what to... What to say, or ask, or do. I don't even know... I mean, what happened?"

Camille takes a deep breath and her hair is caught by the oscillating fan, blowing strands across her face and into her mouth. Impatiently she brushes them away and clears her throat. "I'm sure you'll understand that there is a limit on the information we can disclose about an ongoing case. What we can tell you is that Renee was found this morning by her boss. We don't know too much yet, but it appears it was a cardiac arrest after becoming trapped in the freezer overnight. Your wife was-"

"Partner."

"I'm sorry?" Camille says, confused. Finally the businessman pulls his eyes from the whiteboard, where Camille realises all of a sudden, he could have been reading everything they've got (not that they've got that much at this stage, or that anyone could read her scrawl; there was a reason Richard was the one in charge of writing on the board. She could never quite get the hang of writing vertically.) Those piercing eyes come to look at Camille as he speaks.

"Renee wasn't my wife, Sergeant Bordey. We'd been together sixteen years this October but whenever I brought up marriage she just-" Alfie shrugs. "She said it wasn't her thing. She said we didn't need a marriage certificate. I asked her a few times but she always said no. I had hoped one day she might want to make us more official but..." He trails off and all at once his eyes fill with tears.

Camille steps closer and lays a hand on his arm, drawing him further into the station. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend or upset you." He waves off her apologies and shakes his head. Camille guides him over to sit at the chair behind her desk. Silently Fidel lays a cup of tea on the desk's surface, complete with saucer and teaspoon, just the way Richard serves it. Alfie picks up the spoon without looking at the tea and begins to turn it over in his hands, just for something to do with them. He stares at the light reflection in the bowl of the spoon as if it contains all the answers he'd ever looked for and his eyes look very far away, remembering.

"No, no, don't worry about it. I guess it's a bit of a sore point. We'd had enough arguments about it over the years. I suppose that's why she was... Well, I felt she was drawing away from me. I'd organised a surprise trip for our anniversary next month. I was going to tell her I'd let it go. If she didn't want marriage, she didn't want marriage. I just wanted her. I'd let it go if it made her happy."

"She was pulling away?" Camille says and out of the corner of her eye she can see Fidel surreptitiously making notes on his pad.

A red blush spreads across Alfie's tanned cheeks and he looks away, out of the window and into the quiet afternoon. Camille follows his gaze but can see nothing that would warrant close inspection. Across the road, a woman gets out of her car and walks into the shaded newsagents. In the gap between the buildings, the sea is just visible, sun glinting off it until it sparkles, the reflected glare bouncing into Camille's eyes making her blink. No matter where you are on the island you can smell the sea in the air, carried in by the Caribbean breeze, the salty tang of it flavouring every breath, permeating walls and seeping into buildings. Until her first trip off the island, to Paris when she was thirteen, Camille thought all the air in the world tasted like sea salt. It was a shock to find that in other areas of the world, the oxygen can taste like smoke, like damp earth, like spices. Everywhere in the world has its own taste stamp on the air and she knows that she would know Saint-Marie air anywhere. Blindfolded, flown around the world until she was dizzy and she would still know the moment she stepped off the plane if she was home.

She wonders what the air tastes like in London, for she's never been. How, in Richard's mind, does home taste?

After a few moments staring out to sea, during which she can hear the scratch of Fidel's pen the phone rings, breaking the spell.

"Honore police station," Dwayne says as he picks up on the first ring and Camille pulls her attention back to Alfie as he begins to speak.

"Renee was what you'd call a workaholic," Alfie he mutters, almost under his breath. "But in recent months she'd become worse. I put it down to the restaurant, the attention she was receiving, the pressure it put on her to get better and better. The standards she set for herself..." Alfie shakes his head again. "Nobody could have kept up with them. We split up for a little while a few years ago because of the strain the long hours were putting on our relationship but it only lasted a couple of months. We loved each other. No matter what else happened, that was true."

He brings his gaze back to Camille, dragging his eyes from the hypnotic Caribbean Sea. His brow is etched with deep lines as his sparsely haired eyebrows draw together. "You said she was in the freezer? How?"

"The door lock... Failed." Camille answers, catching herself at the last minute from saying too much.

"Failed?" Alfie gives a hollow laugh. "It would only fail if someone had tampered with it. You hear such horror stories about people becoming stuck. Renee was paranoid about it. Tested it often and if she could avoid it she never went in the freezer without someone else in the building knowing she was in there. She was terrified of it happening to her." Alfie pales. "Once she knew she was locked in... She would have been so scared."


...Miss Monaghan's career has not been without its share of controversy. A very public feud with restaurant critic Guillame Hector has dogged her for the last five years, with Mr Hector resolutely refusing to recognise her as anything but an 'amateur' with 'over-seasoned and overrated' cuisine. Mr Hector has been vocal in his dislike for Ms Monaghan's food with Renee herself being oddly silent on the subject, even when asked directly. The only response she ever gave to questions about whether Hector's barbed comments could be the result of a more personal grievance was that 'a failed novelist reduced to a three inch column in the local paper must have somewhere to direct his anger.' No love lost there.

With the exception of Guillame Hector, other critics have lauded the delicious and inventive concoctions to emerge from the kitchen of Le Petit Papillion. Clearly the public agree, with the restaurant enjoying the best reputation on Saint-Marie. The death of the head chef of sure to have an impact although only time will tell what this impact will be. Although we cannot comment yet on the particular set of circumstances behind Ms Monaghan's demise, the presence of police at the scene and the unprecedented closure of the restaurant last night is sure to set some rumours afloat [cont. on page 9]