Ooh, I'm so excited! I have always wanted to write one of those scenes where the detective gets everyone together and reveals "who dun it"! The best part of any Agatha Christie drama, in my opinion... Anyway, it's in 3 parts, so you lucky people get 3 chapters all at once! Here's the first.

Chapter 23

Just over two hours later, Humphrey was sitting up in his hospital room in rather better order. A good-humoured nurse had helped him navigate his clothes around the various tubes protruding from his body so that he was at least dressed in a loose shirt and shorts – a little unprofessional but still much more dignified than the hospital gown. She'd found him a chair with a leg rest, so he was able get out of bed without disturbing his drip or the leg drain.

While that was going on, he'd been on the phone giving certain instructions to Fidel. He'd also called in another favour from Serena Hope. It'd been a tough call for her to get the additional evidence he'd wanted but somehow, against all the odds and even though it was late evening in Britain by now, she'd come through for him.

A number of chairs had been positioned in from of him in a semi-circle and sitting on them from left to right were seven people. He had to repress a twitch of nerves under their hard gazes as he took them each in.

Clive Lawrence was sitting on the far left. He looked old and weary, the dark circles under his eyes telling of sleepless nights, but his mouth was compressed in that peculiar manner that Humphrey associated with Englishmen of a certain generation. The look that said "I will hold on to my dignity whatever you throw at me". His heart ached for the quiet grief he could see in the man's eyes.

Eddie sat next to his father and was the only one not staring at Humphrey. He was gazing at his tanned knees and picking at a fraying thread on his denim cut-offs. From what Humphrey could make out of his expression it seemed sullen and defensive. There was no sign of sorrow over his sister's death, but Humphrey fancied it was there nonetheless. He found it hard to believe that this 'child' was a man of twenty; there was a lot of maturing that needed to happen before Eddie Lawrence amounted to anything other than an over-indulged rich boy.

His mother sat on his other side, her pale face devoid of make-up and strained, although she was dry-eyed and surprisingly composed. Humphrey's eyes lingered on hers for a moment – what was going on behind that blank mask? Her eyes stared back in his direction, almost as if she didn't see him. She looked to him like a woman who was only just hanging onto the last shreds of her sanity.

Sir Selwyn Patterson sat next to her, his face set to neutral, although his eyes were grimly fixed to Humphrey's face as if daring him to step out of line.

Humphrey passed over his face a little nervously and onto the friendlier countenance of Josh Lawrence, who was looking a little battered with some minor grazes on his face, arms and hands. The journalist gave him a smile and rolled his eyes, as if he recognised the artificiality of the current set-up. Humphrey had to repress his own smile; it was a little clichéd. It was funny the way he'd come to accept the 'denouement' as a perfectly normal part of the case simply because Richard had always done it this way.

Next to him sat a wary-looking Jessica Law, with a nasty bruise on her forehead and her bandaged right arm in a sling. Humphrey looked at her with interest; it was only the second time he had seen her in person. She was very far from the smooth, composed businesswoman he had glimpsed at the hotel yesterday evening, looking ruffled and annoyed.

And next to her, a little apart from the rest, sat Ernest Nieto, handcuffed and with two uniformed officers standing behind his chair. He looked at Humphrey with little expression in his face; no sense of recognition or even a glimmer of emotion. Humphrey couldn't tell whether this was an attempt at deception or just Nieto's stock response during his many encounters with the law.

"Thank you all for coming here – I really appreciate it." He looked at Jessica Law. "Are you feeling alright now, Jessica - I hope you don't mind me calling you that?"

She grimaced and cast an unfriendly look at Patterson and Clive Lawrence. "I'd feel a hell of a lot better if I knew just who it was in that car who tried to run me over."

"Ah, well that's precisely why you're all here. We're about to find out, although first I'm sure you're extremely grateful to Josh here for heroically leaping in the path of the car to push you out of the way just in time."

Apparently, Josh had turned up at the hotel shortly after Camille, and had been standing outside the reception area telling Camille and Dwayne about Humphrey's warning when Jessica Law had stepped out of the door. Before any of them could react, a car had whizzed up the road in front of the hotel and if it hadn't been for Josh's quick reactions, Law would have been knocked over and quite possibly badly injured or even killed. The car had sped off towards the main exit, and Camille and Dwayne had been too busy checking on Josh and Law to warn security to stop it.

They'd both got off fairly lightly, considering they'd collided with some concrete plant pots outside the reception door. However, judging by the cold nod of thanks that Jessica Law directed at Josh and the equally cold way he acknowledged it, there was no love lost between the two. Naturally, Josh still blamed Law for his mother's death.

Humphrey glanced over at Camille, who was standing near the door talking to Fidel on her phone. She looked at him and gave a brief nod of confirmation.

"Good!" He clapped his hands together. "Normally I'd be pacing up and down at this moment, but for obvious reasons, I can't right now, so I'd like you all to imagine that I am." He swallowed at the confused expressions on their faces and added quickly. "Or not. It's entirely up to you."

He tried to avoid Camille's expression, knowing she'd be rolling her eyes, and carried on: "So…this was an intriguing case right from the start. A teenaged girl goes to a party at which drugs are rife and ends up dead from an overdose."

He spread his hands wide. "Sounds like an open-and-shut case, albeit a tragic one, doesn't it? Except for one thing: Emilia was a clean-living, sporty young woman who was known to hate recreational drugs – so much so that she frequently fell out with her brother over them."

He glanced at Eddie, who didn't quite meet his eyes. "Emilia was the reason that you were thrown out of University, wasn't she, Eddie? Your own sister reported you to the police for possession with intent to supply, and the University authorities found out and threw you off the course… That must have made you feel pretty resentful, didn't it?"

He looked up at Humphrey. "Not enough to kill her," he muttered, sullenly.

Humphrey looked at him for a long minute before his eyes softened and he shook his head. "No. I agree – you didn't kill her. Because for all your disagreements, you actually loved her very much, didn't you? I could see that in the photo of the two of you. She looked out for you, even though she was younger. And that was why she reported you to the police – out of desperation as much as anything. I think she probably hoped that it might shock you enough to want to get out of the habit. You might want to think about that."

The young man looked away, his face shamed and angry.

Humphrey looked around the rest of the company. "But I must admit that it confused me for a while. We knew that Emilia had been invited to that party by her brother because that's what she said to her friends, and we naturally assumed that she was referring to Eddie. So, it followed that if she was invited deliberately, perhaps with the purpose of killing her but making it look like an accidental overdose, then that didn't look too good for the brother who invited her. But then, of course, we found out that she'd been referring to her other brother." He nodded at Josh. "Who was trying to find out who killed his mother here on the island, twenty-five years' ago."

Out of the periphery of his vision, he was aware of Jessica Law making a sudden movement but he ignored her.

"So, suddenly this was an extremely interesting case. Donata Lawrence had been investigating a case of financial fraud and may have killed to stop her delivering information to Sir Selwyn. And now it seemed that Emilia had found out something that might lead Josh to his mother's killer…and someone killed her before she had a chance to pass that information on."

"What?" Clive Lawrence leaned towards him, an expression of shock in his eyes. "Are you saying that it wasn't an accident? Someone killed her and made it look like an overdose?"

Humphrey looked at him sympathetically. "I'm afraid so. I'm so sorry to have to tell you that."

Clive paused, seeming to take this in, and Humphrey watched the myriad of emotions passing over his face – disbelief, anger and back to grief. "In a way it's -," he looked down at his hands, with a sad little smile. "- it's rather a relief to know that she hadn't deliberately… well. You know. I couldn't believe it could be an overdose. Not my Emmie. She was too strong for that."

His son shifted slightly beside him, his eyes still downcast.

Humphrey smiled at the bereaved father. "Yes, she was strong, Clive. Strong, intelligent and very caring. You can be very proud of her."

"I just hope…" Clive swallowed and looked up at Humphrey. "What…what did she find out? Was it to do with me?"

"I'm afraid so," Humphrey said, gently. "We think that Emilia found the e-mails that Jonathan Masters had sent you. Before he died, he was trying to blackmail you, wasn't he?"

Clive nodded slowly. "I – I didn't reply to any of the messages. I had just started to consult my London solicitor about the matter, but then they suddenly stopped, and I thought that was an end to it. I heard that he had died, so that would have been why. But I thought I'd deleted all the messages."

Humphrey glanced at Camille, who'd been busy examining Clive's e-mail account before coming to the hospital. She explained: "You'd deleted them, but they were still in your trash can, so I was able to retrieve them, and I imagine Emilia did too."

"You see," Humphrey added, " Jonathan was the only one who knew the truth about your involvement in his pyramid scheme. You invested heavily in it."

"We already know that," Sir Selwyn put in, quickly. "But it was a mistake!"

Humphrey glanced at Patterson and then at Law. "The thing is, it wasn't. What you and Ms. Law didn't know was that Clive knew perfectly well what the scheme was. You believed he had been duped, and Ms. Law used that knowledge to threaten him, but that wasn't true, was it, Clive?"

Clive paused and gave an incredulous Selwyn an embarrassed look before nodding his head. "No, it wasn't. I – I did know all along. He'd been bothering me for years about money for one thing or another, and I'd hoped…I know it sounds ridiculous, but I had hoped that if he made a lot of money out of the scheme, he'd get out of Sainte-Marie and leave me alone." He shook his head, giving the Commissioner another look. "I'm sorry, Selwyn, I wish I'd told you… We both know that Jonathan was permanently short of money and couldn't afford to go anywhere else to make a fresh start. My hope was that once he'd made his fortune out of his victims, he'd have had to leave the island, even if he got away with it this time. I just wanted to be left in peace!"

Humphrey paused and allowed those present to absorb Clive's words fully before going on. "I thought so, because when Sir Selwyn told me that you were usually extremely cautious in matters of money, it seemed odd to me that you were persuaded by a man that both you and Sir Selwyn knew to be a fraudster. You couldn't have been that naïve. But anyway, you gave him the money and took care to make sure that the documents were carefully neutral. That way, if you were ever found out, you could say that you had no idea what the money was for and that you were just helping out an old friend." He grimaced. "Wouldn't have done your reputation any good, but there wouldn't have been actual proof."

Patterson shook his head slowly, his face still registering his disbelief. Humphrey felt momentarily sorry for the Commissioner, who so often seemed utterly sure of himself.

His eyes went to Jessica Law, who was regarding him steadily. "The irony is that Ms Law here used that evidence to get Sir Selwyn off her back…and yet it probably wouldn't have stuck in a court of law even if she had acted on her threat. And the other irony was that you ended up paying dearly for your own fraudulent behaviour, didn't you, Jessica? How many years were you paying for Jonathan Masters' upkeep just to keep his mouth shut? You needn't pretend surprise – we know all about it."

"Twenty-three years," she muttered, glaring at the floor.

He winced. "That's a long time – and a lot of money. Must have pretty much added up to the amount you stole off him in the first place? You must have wanted to bump him off years ago," he added conversationally.

Her eyes flew up to his, startled.

"Oh yes, he was murdered alright. My colleague in London is certain that he was administered a drug overdose sufficient to finish him off. So there we are – three very different victims."

He looked around at his audience. They were all rapt attention now; even Eddie had stopped staring at the floor. "Who killed them – specifically, who killed Emilia? Could it be the upstanding civil servant with a reputation to maintain? The self-centred drug user who resented his sister almost as much as he loved her? The fraudulent hotelier who was being blackmailed? The drug trafficker who had already shown he had no concern for human life? Or even -," his eyes went to Josh. "- the older half-brother? I did consider that too. What if Emilia had passed on her information before she died? What if it was something so damning that Josh had to silence her?"

Josh looked back at him without hostility, his eyes open and enquiring, and Humphrey had to repress a smile before shaking his head.

"No, I knew from the start that that couldn't be true. If it was, you'd have got off the island as quickly as possible. You wouldn't hang around and you'd hardly be so obvious in inviting us to approach you yesterday evening…unless you are seriously egotistical , and I don't believe you are. So it's not you."

"Thank you," Josh replied, drily.

Humphrey paused, looking at his audience again and then smiled a little sheepishly. "You know, my predecessor in this job always focused on three elements: the means, the motive and the opportunity." His eyes met Camille's briefly and he saw her smile reminiscently. "There were some who laughed at him, some who thought he was ridiculously pedantic, but it wasn't such a bad approach to take. He got results. I read through a lot of his case-notes in London and was impressed by his thorough methods. And I usually try to focus on those elements myself." He counted them off his fingers. "The means. The motive. The opportunity."

He paused again and frowned. "The trouble was, it was very difficult to find any one person who had all three of those – the means, the method and the opportunity – to kill our three victims. In particular, the motive was elusive. Who would want to kill Emilia after all? A kind, lovely young woman with lots of friends and no obvious enemies. Not anyone who knew her – surely? The motive was a little easier to understand when it came to Masters, but what about Donata? In fact, the motive is often the most elusive of the elements, and we run the risk of inventing motives that might not exist. In that situation, I often find myself back at opportunity. After all, a person might very well have the motive to kill someone, but that's irrelevant if they don't have the opportunity – and the means."

He looked at Nieto who was looking more attentive. "Now, here's someone who almost certainly had the opportunity and the means in each case. We know he was following Donata before her death, probably on the orders of his then boss – Jessica Law – and that he may have had the means to kill her. He could have driven her off that road. We also know that there's at least a possibility that he was at that party on Saturday, and he certainly had the means to kill Emilia. The motive? Not clear in either case – unless he was being paid by someone, and that's almost certainly his motivation for most of the crimes he commits. But in the end, it comes down to Jonathan Masters, the one who was not killed on the island. Who would have had the means and the opportunity?"

The room was so silent it would have been possible to hear a pin drop.

Humphrey nodded at Camille, who consulted her notebook and gave a little cough before speaking. "We know that Masters died on 4th January, and we know he was killed by an overdose of heroin, probably caused by being injected by Speedball…exactly the same way that Emilia was killed. And we know that Clive, Emma and Eddie Lawrence and Jessica Law were all on Sainte-Marie on that date. However, we also know that the Lawrences purchased one air ticket for travel to London on the 2nd and booked a London hotel room for the 2nd-5th January."

Humphrey nodded in agreement and looked at Clive, Emma and Eddie. "Did one of you travel back to London earlier than the rest? And, if so, why?"

"We didn't!" Emma broke in suddenly before Clive could respond. "And we can prove it. It was Emilia's 18th birthday on the 5th and we had a party here on the island. We actually flew back sometime the following week, all of us at the same time. I would have to check, but I think it was around the 13th or 14th."

Humphrey nodded. "That's right – and we did check. None of you went through passport control on the 5th, but someone did – someone travelled on that Virgin Airlines flight and stayed in that hotel room in London. Someone travelled to Jonathan Master's house and killed him."

He paused and looked at Ernest Nieto again. "And that person was Ernest Nieto."

The drug trafficker was the only person who didn't visibly react to this revelation. He gave just the twitch of a smile and kept his eyes on Humphrey as the others in the semi-circle turned towards him curiously.

"Of course I don't have cast-iron proof yet, but we'll get it. You almost certainly travelled on a fake passport, but we can tie a name used on the flight with the name used to check into that hotel room. And we can investigate CCTV images at Heathrow, and I'm pretty sure that if we carry on looking through your documents we'll find that false passport. And why? What motive would you have to kill Masters? No personal motive, so you were paid to do it."

"Not by me," Jessica Law broke in, glaring at Nieto.

"No, indeed not," Humphrey agreed equably. "Twenty-three years is a heck of a long time to keep paying someone off. If you'd wanted to arrange his death, you'd have done it a very long time ago."

"But then who did pay him?" asked the Commissioner, puzzled.

Humphrey gave him a small smile. "Oh, that's easy enough. It was Emma Lawrence."