A year later, Honoré

"Well, I'd better start writing up my report," DI Humphrey Goodman said to the police station at large. There was only Camille there really, Dwayne and Fidel having already left for Catherine's. He looked across to the desk in the corner; it was far too early to think of taking Richard Poole's desk, after everything.

After his co-opted lead in Richard Poole's death.

After the overt resentment that DS Bordey had shown him. But there was nothing on his desk any longer.

"Ah, where are all my bits of paper and…stuff?" He looked around. But Camille pointed towards Richard's desk.

"I put them on your desk. Sir." She opened her arm towards the DI's desk.

"Oh," Humphrey acknowledged. "Thank you. Enjoy your drink."

"Goodnight." And Camille Bordey walked towards the door. Then she turned. Humphrey was in the corner where the case board was kept, and was looking around, getting his bearings, presumably. She watched him bring over the presentation paper on which the case of Roberta Weymouth had been plotted out. She watched him frown, puzzling over why it had been kept when no others had. Then he turned his head and saw her watching him.

"Roberta Weymouth, stabbed brutally in the back a year ago," Camille told him. "Richard was…indisposed, so it was my case to appraise."

"International smuggling - oh!" Humphrey broke off. "You don't mean the Daesh case?" He looked at the page and then back to Camille. "The Caribbean Ring?"

Camille hesitated. Then, she plunged on. "I don't know that name," she told Humphrey. "Roberta was murdered because of mistaken identity. The woman who the murderer sought went - "

"Went by the same name, yes, I've heard about this," Humphrey told her. "But I didn't know it was here."

"Yes," Camille replied, simply. "Richard was…close to the woman who was involved. But we never did find out who she really was."

"It is clear this was meant to be kept," Humphrey told Camille, who turned and left. Humphrey looked back to the sheet and considered all the nuggets of the case written thereon.

A fortnight later

"I want to talk to you about something," DI Humphrey Goodman told his team. It was early in the morning and the coffee was barely circulating around the nervous systems of the Saint Marie police force. "You remember last week, I discovered an unsolved case?"

"Unsolved?" asked Dwayne, suffering the worst for being at work so early. "Did we really have to be here at seven in the morning, chief?" Humphrey smiled at them all.

"I have found out about her, and you have all helped me," Humphrey told them.

"Who?" they chorused. And Dwayne asked, "How?"

"Your missing woman. Roberta Weymouth." He glanced at the paper, which he had put back onto the case board with magnets. "No, not the murdered Roberta Weymouth, Charlotte Brook, no, Dinah Severn. But, she went by another name, Dwayne, thank you for helping me with this one." Dwayne Myers looked with interest to the DI.

"I did?" Humphrey beamed.

"You all did. I have been asking you questions, and you have been good enough to answer them, Camille, you included." Camille Bordey nodded, and leaned back, putting her hand on the box, which she had signed for on behalf of Richard, from his mother, of various items from his university days. "10th Jan 14" read the postal date, from, "J Poole" and addressed to Richard at the shack, more decently addressed as, "1 Plage de Cluny, Honoré, Saint Marie, 1430." It was not yet sealed to go back to his mother; Camille knew it must go, but kept on making excuses as to why that hadn't happened yet.

"How?" asked Fidel, curious.

"Well, take yourself, Fidel, I asked you for as many towns that you had heard of in Dorset, and you happily gave me this map - " Humphrey broke off and gestured to the map of southern England with various places circled and highlighted. "And you, Dwayne, could easily tell me how many times the person who had changed their name most had changed it. Four times, you told me," he added. "So it was easy to trace the deed poll, and thence, Diana Poole's birth certificate." Camille gave a frown and folded her arms.

"Now, hold on!" she exclaimed. "What gives you the right to look into the background of Richard's…friend…?" Humphrey looked abashed.

"Oh, well, I'm sorry. If you see, I did not ask the commissioner to come to hear me say this; DI Poole - Richard - was your friend and it was your question that you wanted answering as to who Diana Poole was."

Camille looked at Dwayne and then Fidel, then back to Humphrey. "He was very cut up about it. I'd never seen him so distraught. I wish he'd have confided in us. But, he left to return Diana to the UK and then never spoke of her again. I think…" she looked at Dwayne, "...that Richard may have kept it. Usually we keep no case notes; the case report replaces them." She saw Humphrey back away.

"I do apologise," he told them. "In that case, I have overstepped the line, and will…trouble you no further." But none of them wanted that to happen. In fact, Camille looked at Dwayne and Fidel, noting both their expressions, and then nodded too.

"Now you have gone to all this trouble," Camille conceded, "We think…we think we would like to know."

So Humphrey told them of their parents, that they were so close as children that they had to keep Diana and Richard away from one another. "Because, in his father's opinion, Richard wasn't focusing on his work or his life, but spending too much time with her."

"So he went on to university, as you know - " Humphrey gestured to the box behind Camille, on her desk, "And then ran away to be with him. She was very young at this stage, maybe not even ten."

"Not even ten? When Richard was at university?" Dwayne asked, suspiciously. But Humphrey ploughed on.

"Letter after letter, I understand, she sent him, until his father and her mother decided that that was enough. Then she saved up her pocket money and bought a ticket and got all the way to Cambridge to see him - " Humphrey glanced at the notes in his hand, "All the way to Trinity. Richard promised her she would come to see him graduate, but their parents were adamant that they should keep them apart. But, when she was old enough, she enrolled in the forensic criminology course at Cambridge, just to be close to him."

"Sounds very creepy to me," Dwayne told him.

"Hm," Humphrey nodded to him, then looked at his paper again.

"Lover of puzzles, Diana joined a law firm, the one where Roberta Weymouth was employed, and Diana, already not answering to her name, changed the name she had chosen for herself - "Dinah" - to Roberta Weymouth. This was done as a request from MI6 - "

"She was a spy?!" Dwayne exclaimed, warming back up to the memory of Charlotte again. Humphrey nodded.

"Sort of. Her cottage was commandeered, as it was an ideal place to monitor the criminal activities of Noel Svendsen - who changed his name to Neil Stevenson, and positively encouraged to come to Saint Marie to work. Unfortunately for him, his pseudonym and the real reason he was in the Caribbean were well known, and he felt that it was a stroke of luck that the commissioner of the island where he needed to be himself.

"All of this was disturbing to Diana as Roberta, so she made one last name change and used her skill in forensics to land a job in Antigua, close enough to Richard, but fast enough away."

"But, why, though?" Camille asked. Humphrey raised a finger and pointed to the name "Frank Potter."

"Frank Potter was the head of a ring of criminals who were using the proceeds of drug sales to fund middle eastern terrorism. As Neil Stevenson was here, his job was to organise shipments in such a way that it would be implausible that any drugs could be there. Hence the dead bodies - " he pointed to the picture connecting Noel Svendsen to Frank Potter. "DI Poole had been behind the smashing of the European circle of the same organisation that Frank was in charge of here. Richard Poole was under threat," Humphrey added, in case his explanation hadn't been clear enough. "But that then put Diana at risk too - " he shook his head, "No. No!" he exclaimed. Then he looked at Camille.

"When Richard thought this Roberta Weymouth had been killed, how did his reaction change?" Camille looked at Humphrey then back to the board.

"I suppose…his attitude changed, he was devastated when he heard the news at first - when it was established that Roberta Weymouth was not who he believed her to be, he changed - "

"Now Sarge - " Dwayne began, looking to the board. But Camille turned to him.

"He was absolutely devastated, Dwayne, when he thought Roberta Weymouth was the person he knew," shd turned back to look at Humphrey. "As if he had lost part of himself."

"But then?" Camilke looked blabk, and Humphrey added, "Once he realised she wasn't who he knew?"

"Went straight over to Antigua."

"Alone?" Humphrey pressed.

"Yes," Camille confirmed. Humphrey paused for a moment, and then gestured to the four things on the table beside the case board.

"He thought she had turned, been turned, by her work, thought she, as Charlotte Brook, had betrayed the disguise, the part she was playing." He gestured to the table.

"Even though she sought to reassure him with trinkets of things they shared: the silver donkey - "

"Svendsen's donkey sanctuary," Camille nodded. "And the hornless viking."

"The King Alfred treaty with Guthrem where the Danelaw was established," Humphrey elaborated. "There was the motorcyclist too, of the church where Diana had left the money to become owner of Rose Cottage, Beacon Hill, under an ancient law - Alfred the Great's law; Lawrence of Arabia was buried there, and I think Diana would know that Richard would know that Lawrence had a habit of keeping spare change in the fuel cap. But," Humphrey concluded, "Even with all this, Richard still thought she was part of the conspiracy. Given that three of the people she worked with had a vested interest in the Caribbean circle: Frank Potter, John Gold and Harris Kerr.

"But for Richard, it still wasn't enough: he truly believed that Charlotte had been behind the murdering and smuggling if money in the dead bodies."

'No!" Dwayne replied. "I…knew her too; she was not like that.. she was…" He broke off.

"She was the one who suggested you walk her home, wasn't she, Dwayne? On the night a ship came to Antigua from Guadeloupe." Humphrey nodded. "You see, one of the reasons I never went into the spying game was the deceit - I never could bluff, I'm hopeless at cards - "

"There was no bluff!" Dwayne shot back, angrily. Then, in a tone more moderated, added, "I was there, sir, with respect; I was with her - " he shook his head, putting a hand to his forehead. "Gad knaws, I didn't knaw what Charlotte was to him, or I might not have - " Camille, Fidel and Humphrey all looked at him. Dwayne looked back, one of torment, " - I would nat have slept with her!"

"Dwayne, it's - " Camille began

"And I never put it right," Dwayne went on. "I never spoke to the chief about it, never 'ad the right wards…" And Camille stepped over to him, putting her arms around him for a moment. Then, she looked to Humohrey.

"You are saying she was a spy, then? That Richard thought she had turned, and was suspicious of her." Humphrey nodded.

"A young girl, infatuated, follows a young man around the country, but then her loyalty becomes his salvation when she is spotted by British Intelligence and pulls off an undercover operation, which causes her life to end?" Humphrey looked to Camille, and smiled.

"Your summary seems to fit everything I said, it's true," he told her. "But, what if I were to tell you that I could find no trace of a burial or cremation for the body of a Diana Poole, born 26th April 1986?" Camille stared, then looked back to Fidel and Dwayne.

"But…it can't be!" Camille replied. "We saw her die; Richard would not let her go…"

"You think she is still alive?" Dwayne asked. "After everything - no, no, we saw the chief…he was devastated, heartbroken…." He looked across to Fidel. "Can you believe it?" Fidel raised both eyebrows and shook his head.

"My suspicions were aroused with this - " Humphrey held up the fax. "Diana sent the fax, not Richard, thinking he would be here, in the police station, but he had left. These were things, places, that she knew that he would know. She was trying to tell Richard that she was a friend: an ally, not an enemy. Because there was one skill in which Diana was outstanding, her memory. She knew that Richard would know that, if she had been a traitor, she might have used that skill to aid the smuggling operation. By listing all the things they had ever done together, in Dorset, like Mr. Memory in, "The 39 Steps" she hoped to get him to realise she was loyal, and was playing a part. But, Richard never got it. You did. And you thought he had sent it, as a puzzle for you." Humphrey shifted the papers.

"She had memorised the codes that John Gold was transmitting from the forensic laboratories. Just before she was abducted from the forensics laboratory, she was in the administration building, and Diana was able to transmit the codes: signal codes, radio codes, to a waiting Commissioner Somerton, the code John Gold had been using to coordinate his operations. Richard believed - and Harris Kerr believed - that in doing so, Charlotte Brook, aka Diana Poole was a traitor." Humpohrey looked around to his team. "She was not. And I don't believe she died, either."

Camille's eyes drifted slowly back to the box sent to Richard by his mother, Janet Poole. "Then, someone needs to find her, to tell her that he is…gone." Humphrey crossed the floor and put a hand on Camille's shoulder.

"Start with their mum," he told her. "When you send this back to her, with his things, tell her to tell Diana."

The words did not go into Camille's brain at all. It was all too much, too soon. She thanked Humphrey and returned to packing the box as he left the station to speak to a boat hire company.

"They won't fit in, Dwayne, Camille said, sadly. "I'm hopeless at packing - ahh!" She got out all the things again, and put them on her desk. Dwayne walked across to her, and picked up the box, tipping it upside down to try to get it back to its original shape. Something that was lodged inside the bottom flaps of the box fluttered to the floor.

As Dwayne began to pack the box, Camille picked up the paper. It was a letter, from Janet Poole to her son. As she read, Camille's eyes filled with tears. It was the way she had written - to her beloved son.

And then stopped. Camille's mouth fell open as she read the final paragraph once, and then once more, then a third time.

"Dwayne!" Camille exclaimed, then looked at her friend. "Talk me through the logic that you and Fidel used to decide that Diana Poole was Richard Poole's wife…?"

And before he could reply, Camille pointed out to Dwayne the paragraph. ""Your father and I both regret telling you to stay away from Diana,"" Dwayne read aloud, beckoning over Fidel. "" Since the moment she was born, and you took her in your arms, she could not have asked for a better brother…''"