Here's the second part of the denouement.
Chapter 24
This time the reaction to the revelation was more gratifyingly explosive. Patterson exclaimed under his breath, Jessica Law took a sharp intake of breath and both Clive and Eddie turned to stare at Emma.
The only two people who did not respond very obviously were Ernest Nieto, who was as blank-faced as before, and Emma Lawrence herself.
She was looking at Humphrey, her face pale and set. "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," she said, barely above a whisper, her voice low and harsh.
"It's just impossible," Clive interrupted, angrily. "Utterly preposterous! Emma had absolutely nothing to do with it; I made sure of that. Why, she didn't even know about Jonathan Masters…"
Humphrey kept his eyes on Emma. "Well, that's not entirely true, is it? First of all, you saw the e-mails that your husband received from Masters. You have no decent security on that computer, Clive, just a password that she knows, so she had access to your e-mail account all the time. And, in any case, Emma knew of Masters long before she met you, even if she never met him. She had a very good reason for hating him. He may have been responsible for Donata's death."
"But - but what would Mum's death have to do with Emma?" asked Josh, looking confused. "They never even met."
"Ah, but that's the point." Humphrey gestured at Josh. "You were the one who gave me the clue, although it had been nagging at me for a while before. You very conveniently reminded me of the strong resemblance between Emilia and your mother. In fact, the three of you are very alike. You, Eddie and Emilia – all of you have the same colouring and facial features, almost as if you have the same mother and father. You've inherited your looks from your mothers, who are also surprisingly alike. Dwayne thought it might simply be that your father's first and second wives were similar in appearance, both being blonde and blue-eyed, but it was more than that."
He looked at Clive. "Do you remember meeting Donata's English family – her mother's side?"
Clive had been busy staring at his wife in disbelief and visibly started at the sudden question. "Um, well, yes. She didn't come to the funeral but when the boys and I went back to Britain, we had a memorial service for Donata. We didn't keep in touch with her mother after that." He paused reflectively. "Her parents were divorced when she was a child and she wasn't close to her mother. To be honest, I'm not sure her mother cared all that much. She seemed quite cold, and she had no interest in the boys at all, unlike my mother and father."
"I see. Do you remember if Donata's half-sister was there?"
Clive frowned, bewildered. "What half-sister? Donata didn't have one."
Humphrey nodded, emphatically. "Ah, but she did. Her mother remarried and had another daughter when Donata was eighteen. Donata never talked about her to you because it was a sore point – she resented her mother for leaving her father. But she did have a half-sister, and that person was Emma Lawrence – or Emma Morris as she was at that time." He glanced over at Camille, who gave another quick nod. "Fidel has been on the phone checking your marriage and birth certificates – he was able to confirm the details just after you arrived here today."
There was a shocked silence. Emma drew a harsh trembling breath and stared ahead of her, ignoring her husband.
Humphrey gave Clive a sympathetic look. "So you really didn't know that you were married to your first wife's half-sister?"
The man looked utterly shattered as he gazed at his second wife. "I know I didn't meet you before you started working at the Foreign Office," he muttered. Emma glanced at him briefly before focusing on Humphrey again. It was hard to tell what emotion, if any, was hidden behind her frozen expression.
"You probably didn't," Humphrey commented to Clive. "I don't imagine Emma wanted to go to a memorial service held for the half-sister that she had never met."
"So then why would she want to kill Jonathan Masters?" Josh asked. "You made it sound as if she wanted revenge for Mum's death…but then you suggest that she didn't care about her anyway."
Until this point, Emma had remained apparently unaffected, but at this point she burst out with such a passion that Sir Selwyn jumped. "I didn't! She didn't want to have anything to do with me, so why on earth should I care what happened to her?"
Humphrey shrugged. "You didn't. However, you did care about your mother." He glanced at Clive. "Clive, you didn't keep in touch with Donata's mother, so you wouldn't have known that she was admitted to a psychiatric institution the following year. She had been struggling with mental health issues for years. Her second husband had died of cancer, and I suspect she also regretted her estrangement from her older daughter. Donata's death was probably the last straw, wasn't it, Emma?" He glanced at the text message from Serena Hope on his phone. "According to the psychiatrist who treated her at that time, she was admitted for attempting suicide so that she could 'be with her daughter'. That's an exact quote."
He looked up and his eyes softened as he met Emma's eyes. "That must have been terribly difficult for you. You were – what? – only twenty when Donata died, in your last year of a library degree at University, and you had to deal with a suicidal mother who had to be admitted to a secure psychiatric hospital. You had power of attorney, and she was in and out of hospital for years after that, until she died of a heart attack ten years' ago. You must have felt very alone when you were twenty and having to make decisions that a person twice your age would have struggled with.
"But then, by some extraordinary coincidence, you ended up working in the same place as Clive! Not quite the same place – you were working in the library at the Foreign Office while he was in the diplomatic service. I suppose Clive came in at some point and for some reason struck up a conversation with you." His eyes went to Clive with sympathy – the man looked devastated. "I suppose you must have reminded him of the wife he had lost. There's such a strong likeness between you, and for Clive, it must have been like meeting a young Donata again – in terms of looks, that is. In personality, you weren't so alike – Donata was very 'Italian', while you are much more reticent. But anyway, there was an attraction and you fell in love with one another."
He paused, glancing at Josh. "You knew, of course, that he had children and that his first wife had died, so you investigated his background. Clive himself was probably a bit cagey – he didn't want to be reminded of his past. It must have been quite a shock for you to discover the connection! You'd never seen any photos of Donata's family, so you had absolutely no idea that you had fallen for your half-sister's husband.
"You began to make enquiries. I would imagine that Clive refused to say much about Donata's death, and you grew more curious as the years passed. You found out about the fraud case involving Jonathan Masters that Donata had worked on before her death. When you were on Sainte-Marie, you investigated further – looked at the cliff where Donata's car crashed. There have always been rumours on the island from those who knew Donata – she was a good driver and she knew the road too well to make such a mistake. You checked Master's business connections and discovered Law's connection. You suspected one of them for being responsible for Donata's death."
He sighed. "It must have been so difficult for you. You blamed Jonathan Masters and Jessica Law for Donata's death, which had had such a devastating effect on your mother. But what could you do? At the same time, you wanted to protect Clive and your children. So you kept your mouth shut for years, but you still dwelt on it and your resentment grew. And you would probably have carried on that way to the end of your days if Jonathan Masters hadn't decided to get in touch so suddenly."
He looked at Clive. "For some reason, last year, Masters decided to try to blackmail you. He'd had an arrangement with Jessica for years, of course, and we know he was pressuring her to increase the payments. Perhaps he got too greedy? He might have let you off out of sentiment, but suddenly he changed his mind. We'll never know why. But anyway, he had the proof that could bring you down and he started pestering you with e-mails. You ignored them, but Emma saw them – and she recognised the risk to you, and to the entire family."
He focused his attention on Emma again. "You already hated Masters when he wasn't bothering Clive, so for him to suddenly start threatening your husband was just…unacceptable. You had to put a stop to it – but how? You had to make sure that Clive wasn't anywhere near Nieto at the time – you knew perfectly well that if Master's death had been at all suspicious, the e-mails he sent your husband would be found, putting him under suspicion. So Clive had to be out of Britain at the time. Emilia's eighteenth birthday party was the perfect opportunity.
"There was also the problem of who would carry out the murder and how. It wasn't as if you were habitually in touch with assassins in the UK… However, you were here in Sainte-Marie." He gestured at Nieto. "You'd recently started contracting out some gardening work. I'm curious – how did you know that Nieto would be prepared to do the job for you?"
Emma arched an unimpressed eyebrow at him. Clearly she wasn't prepared to give anything away.
"It was all my fault," Eddie said, suddenly. "I was going to buy something from him." He jerked his head in Nieto's direction. "I was negotiating in the garden and Mum caught us out – I didn't realise anyone else was home. It was Speedball and she was appalled – told me not to be so stupid. She'd known of a student in her university days who'd died from taking that combination."
His mother made no attempt to contradict his statement.
"Aha," Humphrey went on. "So that was it. You knew that Nieto possessed a dangerous drug and was prepared to use it. You'd probably checked out Master's situation over the years and knew that he was in fragile health with his heavy drinking and smoking. It wouldn't take much to finish him off – a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin would do it quite easily, I should think.
"So you took the risk. You negotiated with Nieto – paid for his ticket and accommodation and since he could hardly take the drug into Britain himself, you needed to provide twenty thousand pounds in cash – both as a fee and as a means for him to purchase the drug in London. He almost certainly has various contacts in Britain and Europe for his trafficking activities."
He glanced at Emma's stricken husband. "Clive knew nothing of this. We found the details in your household expenses spreadsheet, but they were for your account, not his. You had your own fortune – you'd already inherited plenty of money from your father, and then the rest after your mother's death. You could quite easily pay Nieto to do the job.
"So…that was that. You must have kept a careful eye on the news when you were in Britain earlier this year. Master's death hardly warranted more than a footnote in the local papers – ex-fraudster dead of an overdose. So you knew your plan had worked and that he wouldn't be bothering your husband ever again."
He took his eyes off Emma to look at Camille again. She looked back at him and shook her head very slightly. He suppressed a sigh, knowing she was right. So far, the evidence was all circumstantial. Without a confession, they could never make the conviction stick.
He refocused on Emma. "But then, unfortunately for you, Josh had started his own investigations into Masters… Even as you breathed a sigh of relief over Master's death, your own daughter was being drawn in to the case."
He paused and sighed. This was the bit he hated most, but it had to be done. He gentled his voice as he went on.
"I don't think you ever wanted Emilia to get involved. Your motive was to protect your family…but it all went tragically wrong, didn't it?"
He glanced at her hands; they were visibly shaking as she stared blankly ahead of her.
"What was it that Emilia found on Clive's computer? You may as well tell us; we'll find out anyway."
She paused for a long moment and he thought she wouldn't respond. But then, finally, she sighed and began to speak in a low voice.
"She had found the e-mails from Master and also the e-mail conversation Clive had been having with his solicitor." She glanced at her husband, giving him a crooked little half-smile, which he didn't return. "I think he thought that no one would be able to get into his e-mails, but he's never been great about security. In it, he told his solicitor that he feared Masters had enough evidence for him to be prosecuted for fraud and he wanted advice on how it might be covered up."
She paused again and Humphrey prompted her: "And you found her in the study on Saturday morning, didn't you?"
She looked at him. "Yes. She had the computer on and I could see what she was looking at. She was on the phone talking to someone; I could guess what it was about. I told her to disconnect the call, but she refused." An odd expression passed over her pale face; Humphrey thought it might be a kind of reluctant pride. "She was just furious! I could see it, she was shaking with rage. The only other time I'd seen her so angry was when she found out that Eddie was supplying drugs. She...you see, Emilia had a very strong sense of right and wrong. She either loved something or she hated it. Always black and white, never any shades of grey with her. It didn't matter who you were or what the circumstances were, if you did something wrong, you confessed to it."
She looked at her husband. A brief glance of recognition, understanding even, passed between them and he nodded slowly. She looked back at Humphrey.
"She was angry with Clive for getting into this position in the first place and for not confessing to it at the time. She wanted to know if Donata knew about it and if that was why she had died. I couldn't tell her that, because I didn't know – I just didn't know for certain. She wanted to ask Clive, but I begged her not to; I begged her not to hurt him. She backed down a little but said there was someone she needed to talk to first and then she'd decide. I guessed it was the person on the phone, but I had no idea who – I thought it must be the police, so I told her that it would ruin Clive if he was arrested. She could see how upset I was, and in the end she told me it was nothing to do with the police, that the man on the phone was Clive's son Josh and he simply wanted to know if Jessica Law had had anything to do with Donata's death. I could tell that she was wavering, that she didn't want to see him, but she said that she'd made a promise and she had to keep it. But she also promised me that it would be the last time she'd have anything to do with Josh – she said that she'd meet him tonight and tell him what she had found out and then that would be the end of it as far as she was concerned. She assured me that he didn't want to involve the police, he was only wanted to find out about his mother. We agreed that Clive mustn't know that Josh was here on the island."
The floodgates were open now; she spoke quickly, running sentences into each other, as if she couldn't get her story out fast enough. She paused, gasping for breath before continuing.
"I – I didn't want anything to happen to her! I loved her – I love her… I didn't want her to meet him but she was determined and I couldn't stop her…"
She stopped, unable to go on. Tears ran freely down her face, and Sir Selwyn put a hand on her shoulder to steady her.
"I know," Humphrey said, quietly. "That's the big tragedy in this. If you hadn't arranged Masters' death in the first place, you wouldn't have got involved with a drug trafficker and callous murderer with little respect for human life. Did you really think that it would be possible to carry on as before, as if nothing had ever happened? Despite your sordid little arrangement with him, you continued to employ Nieto to maintain your garden. Possibly you were too scared of him to cancel the contract? Anyway, on Saturday morning, he was working in the garden. You were arguing with Emilia in the study, with the window open. I know that because I heard the conversation she had with Josh. It was your voice we could hear in the background – Camille thought she recognised it but wasn't sure. And then I remembered hearing the sound of the Guadeloupe ferry as it approached the harbour. Exactly the same as this morning, when Camille and I were in the study…and we had the windows open then too.
"So Nieto heard the entire conversation. He knew that Emilia had found out about Clive's involvement with Jonathan Masters and that she intended to pass her information on Josh Lawrence. He didn't need anyone to start investigating potential links between the Lawrences and Masters' death.
"Of course he had no idea where Josh Lawrence might be, but he had a stroke of luck. He'd heard her tell Josh to text a location to meet up later on. He'd also heard from one of his associates, another embittered former employee of Jessica Law – and this man had been contacted by a certain journalist, who was offering to pay him for information about certain events that took place twenty-five years' ago. The man had asked Nieto what he could and couldn't say. Nieto put two and two together and realised that this unknown journalist must be Josh."
He looked at Nieto. "You told this man to give Josh the run-around, didn't you? He was to invite Josh to the party, because then Josh would invite Emilia to the same place. But then he was to draw Josh away and force him to follow him around for half the night, so that Emilia wasn't able to meet him immediately.
"You were at that party with another of your associates, a young woman who we will be tracking down to have a little chat with. You saw Emilia arguing with Eddie and then you saw Eddie going off to make his little transaction with Daniel Le Fondre – oh yes, you knew all about that little side-line and you made certain that Daniel and his brother paid for it by doing whatever you told them to without asking any questions. You've got a lot of these little 'associates', haven't you? People who 'owe' you favours that they can't get out of. I imagine this woman has a similar problem.
"You had already decided what you would do with Emilia. She would get the same treatment as Masters, although there was every chance that she might survive. That's the thing about Speedball. It's an incredibly dangerous combination of drugs and it's impossible to tell who will survive. Emilia might have, but she would still be in no condition to give Josh any coherent information. You did it quite simply in the end – all you had to do was contrive to bump into Emilia and inject the needle into her upper arm under cover of 'accidentally' burning her arm with your cigarette. She reacted as anyone would in the circumstances, you probably apologised profusely, as any clumsy smoker would have done, and she walked away, rubbing her arm and perhaps wondering why it hurt so much. She would have seen the burn but not noticed the needle mark – if she had, she might have realised what had happened and sought medical help before it was too late."
He paused. "I'm not going to dwell on the next few hours for Emilia, but I can't imagine they were pleasant ones for someone who had never taken drugs before. By the time she realised something was wrong, she wouldn't have been in a position to do anything about it. She must have been terribly confused and disorientated. The cocaine would have given her an adrenaline rush, but by the time she met Josh, the effects would have been wearing off, leaving the depressant effects of the heroin. She would have felt aggressive and hostile and probably extremely unwell." He looked at Josh. "She didn't react very well to you in the circumstances. The heroin dose was fatal… The evidence suggests that shortly after you left her, she went into respiratory arrest and died."
He turned his attention back to Nieto, looking at the man with extreme dislike. "Your female associate had stolen Eddie's newly purchased joint from his pocket earlier on and given it to you. You and she were keeping an eye on Emilia; you saw that she had collapsed behind the sofa." He paused, trying to keep calm. "You want to know what really gets me about that? You didn't even know if she was alive or dead at that point. Did you even care about what you'd done? If you'd called for help, you might just have saved an innocent young woman's life. Well, I guess we'll never know."
Nieto stared at him, blank-faced.
Humphrey suppressed his revulsion. "While you and the woman were there, masquerading as two more passed-out party-goers, Eddie came in and found his sister. In all the confusion, you burst into action. You were able to push Eddie aside and pretend to resuscitate Emilia while planting your evidence – you put residue from the joint in her mouth and on her fingers and left it lying on the floor nearby. All the time, your associate was drawing attention from what you were doing by ringing the emergency services and talking in a loud, panicky voice. When the paramedics arrived, you and she simply melted away."
He looked up at the uniformed officers. "You can take him away. Charge him for the murders of Jonathan Masters and Emilia Lawrence, and also the attempted murders of Camille and myself. And the drug trafficking, of course, and supply of a dangerous drug that is known to have caused the death of at least six people on this island... And I want his companion found and brought in as quickly as possible. Put the entire team on it."
Nieto was led out. He made no attempt to struggle or to communicate with anyone, and Humphrey reflected with disgust that he almost certainly felt no remorse for his part in either Masters' or Emilia's deaths. There was no helping such a monster, and with any luck his crimes would see him put away for the rest of his life.
He looked at Emma Lawrence. She was sobbing openly now, although quietly. Patterson still had a hand on her shoulder, but his face was stony and he made no other attempt to soothe her. Clive had his head in his hands. Eddie's head was drooping, his face pale and sad as he looked away from his mother.
"Emma Lawrence, you are under arrest for colluding in the murder of Jonathan Masters and for perverting the course of justice. There may be other charges, but that's enough to be going on with. Dwayne, please -."
She sobbed loudly as Dwayne pulled her to her feet and handcuffed her. "I'm sorry… Clive, I'm so sorry… Please forgive me…"
Clive Lawrence kept his face buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking, as his wife was led out of the room.