Aslan turned back to look at Rianka as she slept twisted in the cotton sheets of their bed. She looked so at peace, Aslan thought to himself. Like a beautiful angel. And, as he’d told himself a thousand times over the last decade and a half, he owed everything that was now good in his life to this woman. It was that simple. And debts like that could never be repaid.
Once Aslan had got dressed, he swept down the mahogany staircase of The Retreat, careful his white cotton robes didn’t knock over any of the artfully arranged ethnic icons or trinkets that variously stood on pedestals or hung from the wall. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned into the hotel’s ultra-modern kitchen and was pleased to see that someone had already laid out a willow pattern teapot and porcelain cups on a tray for him.
Aslan started the kettle boiling and looked out of the window. Manicured lawns stretched down through an avenue of tall palm trees to the hotel’s beach, where the Caribbean sea sparkled emerald green as it lapped against the white sand. With a smile, Aslan saw that the guests for the Sunrise Healing were already on the beach, stretching and taking the air following their early-morning swim.
Mind you, his eyesight wasn’t what it once was, and, as he looked more closely at the five people in their swim things, he found himself frowning. Was that really who was going to be in the Sunrise Healing session with him? In fact, Aslan realised, if that’s who was attending the session, then something had gone seriously wrong.
Aslan’s attention was brought back to the room as the kettle came to the boil with a click. He poured the water into the pot and let the familiar smell of green tea calm him. After all, he had much more in his life to worry about than who was or wasn’t attending one of his therapy sessions. Perhaps this was no more than karma realigning itself?
He couldn’t hide from his past forever, could he?
By the time Aslan took the tray of tea outside, he’d decided that he’d just carry on as normal. He’d lead the guests to the Meditation Space. Just as normal. He’d lock the room down. Just as normal. He’d then share a cup of tea with them all and start the Healing. Just as normal.
‘Good morning!’ Aslan called out to get the attention of the five guests down on the beach. They all turned and looked up at him. A few of them even waved.
Yes, he decided to himself, it was all going to be just fine.
It was half an hour later when the screaming started.
At the time, most of the hotel guests were finishing their breakfast in the outdoor dining area, or were already wearing white cotton robes and heading off to their first treatment of the day. As for Rianka Kennedy, Aslan’s wife, she was sitting out on the hotel’s verandah, a wicker basket of sewing at her feet as she darned one of her husband’s socks.
The scream seemed to be coming from one of the treatment rooms that sat in the middle of The Retreat’s largest lawn: a timber and paper Japanese tea house that Aslan and Rianka had christened the ‘Meditation Space’.
When a second scream joined the first, Rianka found herself running across the grass towards the Meditation Space. It was a good hundred yards away and, when Rianka had covered about half the distance, Dominic De Vere, The Retreat’s tanned and taut handyman, appeared as if by magic from around the side of a clump of bougainvillea. As usual he was wearing only cut-off jeans, flip-flops and a utility belt full of various tools.
‘What’s that racket?’ he asked somewhat redundantly as Rianka flashed past him. After a moment, he turned and trotted after her.
Rianka got to the door of the Meditation Space, and, as there was no handle on the outside of it, tried to jam her fingers into the gap between the door and the frame with no success. It wouldn’t budge—it was locked from the inside.
‘What’s going on?’ she called out over the sound of screams.
Dominic finally flapped over on his flip-flops and caught up with Rianka, if not the situation.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘Dominic, get that door open!’
‘I can’t. There’s no door handle.’
‘Use your knife! Just cut through the paper!’
‘Oh! Of course!’
Dominic grabbed the Stanley knife from the pouch at his belt and clicked the triangular blade out. He was about to slash through the paper of the tea house’s wall when they both saw it: a bloody hand pressed up against the inside.
They then heard a man’s voice, thick with fear: ‘Help!’
And then a different female voice: ‘Oh god! Oh god!’
There was a scrabbling while someone wrestled with the lock on the inside of the door. A few moments later, the door was yanked inwards by Ben Jenkins, who then just stood there in lumpen horror.
Ignoring Ben, Rianka stepped into the Meditation Space and saw that Paul Sellars was lying on his back on a prayer mat, having difficulty waking up. Ann, his wife, was kneeling at his side shaking his shoulders. Rianka could see that both of them had spots of blood on their white cotton robes. As for Saskia Filbee, she was standing off to one side, her hands over her mouth, stifling another scream. There was blood on her sleeve as well.
But it was the woman standing in the centre of the room that drew Rianka’s attention. Her name was Julia Higgins. She was in her early twenties, she’d been working at The Retreat for the last six months, and in her left hand she was holding a bloody carving knife.
At Julia’s feet a man was lying quite still, his once white robes, beard and hair now drenched in blood, a number of vicious knife wounds in his back.
Aslan Kennedy—hotel-owner, yoga instructor and self-styled Spiritual Guru—had clearly just been viciously stabbed to death.
‘I killed him,’ Julia said.
And now it was Rianka’s turn to scream.
A few hours before the murder of Aslan Kennedy, Detective Inspector Richard Poole was also awake. This wasn’t because he’d trained himself to turn delicately to each day’s sunrise like a flower; it was because he was hot, bothered, and he’d been awake since a frog had started croaking outside his window—inexplicably—just before 4am.
But then, Richard thought to himself, this was entirely typical, because if he wasn’t being assaulted by frog choruses in the middle of the night, it was torrential downpours like a troupe of Gene Kellys tap-dancing on his tin roof; or it was whole dunes of sand being blown across his floorboards by the hot Caribbean wind. In fact, Richard considered, in all ways and at all times, life on the tropical island of Saint-Marie was a misery.
Admittedly, he’d collected empirical evidence that suggested that Saint-Marie was a popular holiday destination for tens of thousands of other people, but what did other people know? This was an island where it was sunny every second of every single day apart from the ten minutes each morning and night when a tropical storm would appear out of nowhere and rain hard enough to flatten cows. And that wasn’t even counting the three months of the year when it was no longer the hot season because it was now the hurricane season—which, in truth, was just as hot as the hot season, but altogether more hurricaney.
And none of